When I arrived in New York City fresh out of graduate school in 1977, the city’s food scene couldn’t have been more different than it is today. Even calling it a scene would have been absurd: the farmers-market movement had barely begun, few liquor stores sold anything like an international selection of wines, and only a handful of restaurants…

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Everyone Eats . . .

The initial reviews of the Nexus One device were largely positive but one area where Google certainly faced issues was customer support. Unlike most other companies in the hardware business, Google doesn’t offer any phone support for Android / Nexus One

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Google Adding Direct Phone Support for Nexus One Customers

Ladies and Gents, ‘Tis the season for not counting calories… it’s time for the Cookie Party ! We know we have some great cooks within our great group of dancers, so we can’t wait for you to bring in the treats for this Friday’s Group Class and Dance Party.

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Cookie Party & Holiday Showcase!

One month is over, and another month begins (this also means 5 weeks until I go to the Dominican Republic… on a school trip!). Its time to review how I did last month and what I plan to get done this month, stitching wise.January ReviewStitch one Ornament – YesFinish Lettres A Mon Chat – YesWork on Tour – YesWork on Art Deco Spirits – YesBlogiversary Gift – Started, but not finishedFebruary

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January Review and February Goals

Todays news that a mental health charity has been fined 30,000, plus 20,000 costs, for failing to protect the health and safety of their employee serves as a timely reminder of the importance of conducting regular robust risk assessments.

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The high cost of failure to conduct health & safety risk assessments

–NYTPicker, an anonymous site devoting to giving the Times a hard time, has an interesting item that says the paper overlooked a felony conviction in a lengthy profile Saturday about a small-business lender. Making sure subjects are properly vetted is a real concern, obviously, especially in stories these days about lenders

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Audit Notes: Times Nicked; Defining Populism; Special Dividends; Intrepid Blogger, etc.

These are tough times, and politicians have to make hard choices about how to spend the smaller amounts of money they have. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, for example, has told the city’s labor unions, including teachers, police officers and firefighters, that they will probably have to decide between smaller raises or layoffs, a decision he called “a Hobson’s…

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Natural Selection

On Friday, I was part of a plenary session to discuss progress toward the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This was my first plenary at Davos and I noticed that the auditorium thankfully looked much smaller from the stage — it looks much bigger when you are in the audience! Nearly all the MDGs are closely related to the mission of microfinance so it was an honor to be part of the far-ranging discussion. Mark Malloch-Brown moderated the panel that featured Bill Gates; Jeff Sachs; Morgan Tsvangirai, prime minister of Zimbabwe; Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator and former president of New Zealand; and Michael Kazatchkine, head of the Global Fund, which is devoted to combating AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis

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Davos 2010: Millennium Development Goals and the Partnership of Business, Government, and Nonprofits

On page 350 of Too Big To Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports on how Hank Paulson reacted that fateful Sunday, September 14, 2008, upon learning that the British government was refusing to approve an emergency deal to have Barclay’s buy Lehman Brothers, a move that could conceivably have averted the catastrophe that instead ensued. The general opinion in…

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On Paulson’s Sole-Source Account in the WSJ’s News Pages

How did they come up with that amazing production number on the Grammys last night in which a soaking-wet Pink twirled high above the stage in a transparent body suit, singing Glitter in the Air while spraying water droplets all over the coutured crowd? I have no idea, but I’m guessing it originated in a brainstorming session.

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Pink’s Grammy Showstopper and the Creative Process

The anachronism that is state-based insurance regulation has basically gotten a pass in the financial crisis—what with all the problems in federally based banking regulation. But a 19th-century holdover it surely is, and the Times’s Mary Williams Walsh does a nifty job of highlighting just one of its problems in a good get this morning that discovers that AIG’s…

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NYT’s AIG Story Puts Spotlight on State Insurance Regulation

Reuters reports that AIG may have misled investors on material information related to its exposure to subprime mortgages. Investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein has waded through Schedule A and determined that some 30 percent of the CDO’s insured were after 2005.

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Audit Notes: Uh Oh, Joe Cassano; Asian Markets; BW Hires

(Editors’ Note: follow all of HBR.org’s Davos reports ) On June 11, 2010, Mexico’s national soccer team, El Tricolores (literally, The Three Colored) will take on South Africa’s Bafana Bafana (The Boys) in the opening match of the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg. That’ll mark the second time this year that the two nations have faced off. The first match-up took place earlier this week at the WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos, where the leaders of the two emerging markets vied for the attention of the world’s biggest businesspeople and investors

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Davos 2010: Mexico Vs. South Africa

Bill Clinton’s appeal to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday reminded us that Haiti’s crisis is far from over. He urged the business community to step up to the challenge of supporting and rebuilding Haiti, where 200,000 are dead and 1.5 million are homeless. “We need to get a distribution network up to get the food and the water out,” Mr Clinton said.

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Haiti and the Leadership Vacuum

Whether you’re a fan of a global cap on carbon emissions or not, it’s important to understand what the failure of the meeting in Copenhagen last month means (that a global agreement is going to be unlikely in the near term) and what it doesn’t mean (that your company will be off the hook for tackling carbon emissions).

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Failure at Copenhagen Doesn’t Mean Businesses Are Off the Hook

There was something intriguing, even a little perplexing, about President Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday night. It’s the same intriguing note to be found in many of Obama’s most important speeches. And before you ask, it isn’t ideology or rhetoric or even oratory, but something deeper and more complex: It is the clear evidence of a way of thinking not often seen in the Oval Office, or indeed in the corner office.

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Barack Obama’s Integrative Brain

For the past few months, Opportunity International’s U.S. operation has been looking for a new CEO, and as a board member of the organization, I’ve been helping with the search. Opportunity is one of the world’s largest microfinance institutions, serving 1.5 million poor families in 28 developing countries.

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Wanted: A Champion for 1.5 Million of the World’s Most Needy

The announcement of Apple’s iPad is turning many people’s thoughts to the innovations behind big ideas . Innovations such as these play a critical role in a company’s future, but companies often hinder themselves by focusing on finding the next big thing, when in reality, the next small thing might be more beneficial. The more that employees are encouraged to think creatively and apply that creativity, the more flexible in practice and nimble in responsiveness a company becomes.

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How to Encourage Small Innovations

“If she just would have gotten to know us…maybe it would have gone a different way” said Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, in an excellent 2009 Frontline episode titled The Warning. The ‘she’ Levitt refers to is Brooksley Born , former Chair of the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who waged an unsuccessful campaign to regulate the multitrillion dollar derivatives market, whose crash helped trigger the recent financial collapse. Ms

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Brooksley Born and the Power of an Opposing Idea

Barack Obama began his presidency with one of the most ambitious programs of change in history — with major initiatives in defense, foreign affairs, economic recovery, health care, the environment, and more. Now that the administration has completed its first year, politicians and pundits are assessing what the President has accomplished.

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Obama’s Change Management Report Card