Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.

The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.

Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.

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

One of the problems that exacerbates procrastination is the feeling that you have lots of different things to do and no clear sense of which matter more, when they should be done, etc.

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromising. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead…the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.