German Beer, Chinese Natural Gas, and US Manufacturing Is the US economy struggling?  Economists and policy makers look at statistics and trends to draw conclusions.  Data is important.  But sometimes anecdotal evidence is useful as well. On May 1, three stories in the Washington Post didn’t seem to have much in common.  They were about …Read More

Google Searches: the New Investment Strategy? According to an article published this month in Nature, big-data researchers discovered that analyzing Google search terms over 8 years produced an investment strategy that clobbered even the best stock pickers.  Using the word “debt” in search phrases resulted in a strategy that gained over 300% vs. 11% for …Read More

J. K. Rowling on the Benefits of Failure In her 2008 commencement address at Harvard (with crimson banners all around, the event was for her the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion) J. K. Rowling told the graduates and proud parents that 21 years before, she graduated and failed “on an epic scale” and entered a dark …Read More

The 4th Key to Success Most of us would agree that career success comes from a mixture of these three elements: Talent Hard work Opportunity (or, Luck) But in his new book, Give and Take, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant suggests that increasingly there is another key: Success depends heavily on how we …Read More