By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

Breaking tasks down into smaller sub-tasks can be very useful.

In effect, dividing your attention means that neither (or none) of the things you're working on is really getting the full effect of your intelligence, and that it in the end takes you longer than it would if you did one thing at a time.

You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.

In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.

Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.

Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence, diversity, private judgement-disappear.