I was nearly killed during the drafting of this post. I hope that some of you out there in Blogland will benefit from my experience. Part I: Organic Intelligence West Greenwich Village, New York City—Monday October 29, 2012 4:00pm ET. As I draft this, I’m in the middle of readying our downtown, Hudson River-fronting New […]
There’s so much talk around here about value that I’ve been accused of being obsessed by it. I plead no contest. Particularly in these stressed economic times in which we seem mired for the foreseeable future, the quest for value is a search that most of us pursue, in both our personal and professional lives, […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
When I first moved to New York in the mid-70s, I was working downtown for New York State’s Emergency Financial Control Board. Yes, Virginia, we’ve had financial crises before, and that was a pretty bad one. My job was conducting ‘financial intelligence’ about the city subway system. A guy I worked with shared my interest […]
When Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole, she entered a world (“Wonderland”) reminiscent of her own—but in which everything seemed upside-down, and nothing worked as expected. After spending over a year researching the economics of the health care industry, I’ve concluded that health care is its own economic Wonderland. If you were given the hypothetical […]
I recently found a whitepaper the name of which startled me: “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan”. Startling in the frankness of its analysis, startling in the clarity of the remedies it calls for, and most of all startling in its applicability to my own field of business research and analytics. […]
When I first got to Yale, I was struck that our motto LUX ET VERITAS was an extension of Harvard’s Veritas. I used to kid people that Yale was obviously twice as good—you got all the same Veritas, with the 100% added bonus of the Lux. Whatever that was. Product differentiation Later I came to […]
Last time we looked at where our health care funds in the US are spent. At more than one-sixth of our GDP, it’s undeniably a huge factor in our financial lives. Who pays for all this? Ultimately, of course, we all do—but the mechanisms by which this happens may surprise you. Since non-personal spending ($407 […]
Everyone knows health care is expensive, and is a significant part of our individual and collective budgets. How expensive, exactly? And how is that money spent? In 2010 we in the US spent $2.6 trillion on health care. That’s 2.6 with twelve zeros behind it, or 2.6 million millions if (like me) you get lost […]
In the interest of full disclosure, this post is not about algebra or calculus, nor is it about financial instruments. It’s about various kinds of business research ‘raw materials’ and how to discern their quality if you are a producer or user of such research. Whether you are navigating the waters off Tuscany in a […]