The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.

Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.

Companies, like people, don't much like to change.

What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.

I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.

It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.