James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki
James Michael Surowieckiis an American journalist. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
cutting player dvds
In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.
cutting technology practice
In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.
differences america people
In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.
real struggle assets
In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.
multitasking efficient
Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.
america
The business of America shouldn't be subsidizing business.
cyberspace needs should
Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need.
player apples giving
If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us.
mean attention dividing
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.
self people legacy
Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.
world news good-news
In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.
greed financial moments
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.
thinking way multitasking
I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.
country heart done
In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.