Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Reporting Company Results

    I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not (which in my case usually means it is), but Rowan Simpson gives a concise lesson detailing the three ways companies report their results, and how misleading each can be. Size “We made a net profit of $15 million.” Growth “Revenues increased by 9%.” Acceleration “We…

  • Iconic Logo Designers

    Last year logo designer David Airey launched Iconic Logo Designers. As he describes it from his post announcing the launch: On the iconic logo designers website, you’ll find biographical info and resources on more than 35 of the world’s most outstanding creatives. Seeing this I was reminded of how much I love the elegant simplicity…

  • The Declining and Thriving News Magazines

    While Time and Newsweek saw double digit falls in revenue last year, The Economist saw similar sized gains—despite increasing subscription rates (previously). The Atlantic discusses this phenomenon, looking in detail at why The Economist is thriving in a market seemingly in decline. The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact…

  • Microsoft, Google and Startups Compared

    After visiting both the Microsoft and Google campuses to discuss Stack Overflow (Google Tech Talk: Learning from StackOverflow.com), Joel Spolsky discusses the similarities and differences between the two corporations and his own small company. What I’ll probably remember most about the trip is what I learned about company culture and how it’s affected by scale. Giant corporations…

  • The Most Important Century

    The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer. It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that…

  • Body Language Mimicry

    It is said that mimicking a person’s body language helps to create false camaraderie–a manufacturing of attraction, if you will. Conventional wisdom holds that this is because it helps you, the mimicker, empathise. This is false, recent research shows, but not far off; face and body motion mimicry actually “helps you to see them as they…

  • The Realistic Threat of Terrorism

    To think rationally about risk is to think probabilistically / statistically about the dangers we face. Noting that “the most dangerous person you’re ever likely to encounter – by several orders of magnitude – is the one you see in the mirror every morning”, John Goekler offers some perspective on what risks we really should…

  • The Mars Bar Unit of Account

    The fluctuating weight of the Mars Bar is quite a contentious issue here in the UK. Answering a query as to whether economists take this into account (and not just price fluctuations) when calculating inflation using the Retail Prices Index, economist Tim Harford offers some entertaining information regarding the Mars Bar unit of account. The Mars…

  • The Evolutionary Grounds for Depression

    Depression is an emotional response that has evolved to prevent us from experiencing mentally damaging events, a number of recent studies are starting to suggest. As pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and…

  • How To Be Happy in Business

    ‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Business’ Venn diagram. Reminding me of the love–growth–cash triangle (previously posted), this Venn diagram is an infographic worth looking at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly…