Life’s Work: A HBR Interview with John Cleese

Life’s Work: John Cleese

An Interview with John Cleese by Adi Ignatius

John Cleese became a comedy icon in the 1970s for his work on Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers. Later, while continuing to act, he ventured into corporate training, producing videos that mixed management wisdom with dry British wit. He’s now working on a memoir, doing stand-up shows to pay his alimony bills, and preparing for a much-anticipated Python reunion.Interviewed by Adi Ignatius

HBR: How did the Python team manage itself? Who made the final decisions? Read more of this post

The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More

The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More Hardcover

by David DeSteno  (Author)

What really drives success and failure?
Can I trust you? It’s the question that strikes at the heart of human existence. Whether we’re talking about business partnerships, romantic relationships, child-parent bonds, or the brave new world of virtual interaction, trust, when correctly placed, is what makes our world spin and lives flourish. Read more of this post

It’s one of the great executive challenges of our time: How can I give my all to my job and yet live a rich, rewarding personal life?

From the Editor: My Work, My Life

by Adi Ignatius

It’s one of the great executive challenges of our time: How can I give my all to my job and yet live a rich, rewarding personal life?

We talk a lot about work/life balance—implying that 50/50 is the ideal split between our jobs and everything else. But as Harvard Business School’s Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams show in “Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life,” achieving such a balance is an elusive, if not impossible, goal. Instead, the authors suggest, leaders should make deliberate choices about the lives they want to lead—about which opportunities to pursue and which to decline. Otherwise, they’re apt to be constantly juggling priorities and rarely engaging fully in anything. Read more of this post

Termites Teach Robots a Thing or Two

Termites Teach Robots a Thing or Two

ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Updated Feb. 13, 2014 7:17 p.m. ET

CHICAGO—Inspired by termites, Harvard University researchers have designed a construction crew of tiny robots able to build complicated structures without blueprints or outside intervention. Read more of this post

Pablo Picasso’s most readily accessible painting isn’t in a museum. It hangs in a New York restaurant, in a building whose owner reportedly thinks that the painting is a piece of junk and wants to get rid of it.

Picasso’s Unmovable Feast

TERRY TEACHOUT

Feb. 13, 2014 3:39 p.m. ET

Pablo Picasso’s most readily accessible painting isn’t in a museum. It hangs in a New York restaurant—a restaurant that is housed in a building whose owner reportedly thinks that the painting is a piece of junk and wants to get rid of it. Read more of this post

Noonan: Reliving History-and Learning From It; What Diane Blair’s papers tell us about the Clintons, and why people preserve their archives.

Noonan: Reliving History—and Learning From It

What Diane Blair’s papers tell us about the Clintons, and why people preserve their archives.

PEGGY NOONAN

Feb. 13, 2014 7:07 p.m. ET

All the Northeast is covered in snow, and the sound and clamor of Washington is muffled. The federal government took a day off; the news is full of weather. Not a bad time to ponder why people do what they do—more specifically, why witnesses to history often take notes on what they see and hear, and in time leave their papers to universities and libraries. Obviously we’re keying off this week’s story of Diane Blair, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, who died in 2000 and whose papers were given by her husband to the University of Arkansas. There they were kept sealed until 2010. An enterprising reporter for the Washington Free Beacon, Alana Goodman, took a look and found a small trove of journal entries and memos that add texture to our understanding of the Clinton era. Which, it occurs to me, may some day be referred to as the first Clinton era, but that’s another column. Read more of this post

Career women in bad marriages

Career women in bad marriages

Friday, February 14, 2014 – 09:08

The Star/Asia News Network

KUALA LUMPUR – Harian Metro reported that three female professionals in Kuala Lumpur have been subjected to torture and sexual abuse by their husbands. Read more of this post

Businessmen of a century ago didn’t place ‘competition’ on a revered pedestal. Merger and monopoly were considered preferable.

Book Review: ‘Harriman vs. Hill,’ by Larry Haeg

Businessmen of a century ago didn’t place ‘competition’ on a revered pedestal. Merger and monopoly were considered preferable.

ROGER LOWENSTEIN

Feb. 13, 2014 5:49 p.m. ET

Takeover wars seem to have lost their sizzle. What happened to the battles of corporate goliaths? Where have they gone, those swaggering deal makers? “Harriman vs. Hill” is a corporate dust-up that takes us back to the beginning of the 20th century, when tycoons who traveled by private rail merrily raided each other’s empires while the world around them cringed. Read more of this post

S’pore ex-lecturer talks of dicey journey with drugs

S’pore ex-lecturer talks of dicey journey with drugs

Friday, Feb 14, 2014
The New Paper
By Rennie Whang

SINGAPORE – He was a lecturer with a tertiary institute and a former general manager with a public-listed company.

In December 2010, he was busted for taking methamphetamine, also known as Ice. Read more of this post

There is no such thing as the banking profession; Self-inflicted injuries result from a lack of both common purpose and shared values

Last updated: February 12, 2014 7:13 pm

There is no such thing as the banking profession

By John Gapper

Self-inflicted injuries result from a lack of both common purpose and shared values

Antony Jenkins’ efforts to change the culture of Barclays by cutting bankers’ pay are on hold. At its investment bank, it is paying bonuses that are 13 per cent higher to “compete in the global market for talent”. The bank’s chief executive wants to reform the pay of US and Asian investment bankers but it is beyond his control. Read more of this post

Everything I Know About Investing I Learned From My Drivers’ Ed Teacher

February 12, 2014, 11:00 AM

Everything I Know About Investing I Learned From My Drivers’ Ed Teacher

JASON ZWEIG

Kids who grow up in farm country learn how to drive early.

When I was a teenager in the mid-1970s in the foothills of New York’s Adirondack Mountains, I and all my friends drove tractors and bashed-up jalopies through the hayfields and on the dirt roads long before any of us had a learner’s permit or a driver’s license. Read more of this post

A Stanford recipe for bloat-free expansion

February 12, 2014 3:56 pm

A Stanford recipe for bloat-free expansion

Review by Andrew Hill

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, Crown Business, $26

How to get big without getting bloated is one of the greatest challenges facing growing businesses. Start-ups want to know how they can expand without adding layers of deadening process. At the same time, large companies want to know how to replicate the creativity and in­novative prowess of start-ups without triggering an anarchic free-for-all. Drawing on the authors’ own and others’ insights, Scaling Up Excellencepromises many answers to those pressing questions. Read more of this post