Blog

Category: Management Theory

  • Explaining The Economy

    Kyla Scanlon has a book explaining the economy. There are some nice parts, and some things I wasn’t too sure about. (At least one graph seemed really odd as did a couple of comments but, being a popular book, the references were a bit too limited to check properly). Mostly she does a good job…

  • Considering Stakeholder Psychology

    An important book in the world of sustainable business is Leveraging Corporate Responsibility by CB Bhattacharya, Sankar Sen, and Daniel Korschun. It was published in 2011, so things have moved on, not least the terminology. In 2025 they might well have decided to use the term sustainable business rather than corporate responsibility. Still, their basic…

  • Lower Cost Is Not Always Better

    One of the big challenges for sustainable business is that sometimes it costs more. Although higher costs driven by sustainable decision-making is not always the case, if you are providing higher quality, paying your workers or suppliers more, or reducing pollution from your products then sometimes this costs more. While it is beneficial to ensure…

  • Leapfrogging Towards A Better World

    One concern that people who care about the environment typically have is that developed nations tend to create massive harm to the planet and life on it. That concern is often hard to argue with. A valid concern has led some — let us call them the shitty wing of environmentalism represented by Paul Ehrlich…

  • Being Fair To People You Don’t Agree With

    Being fair to people you don’t agree with is a really challenging task. After all, from your viewpoint, they are wrong. It can be pretty easy to see the holes in their arguments. Indeed, we can be really great at that. Although we are generally not so talented at taking apart our own arguments. When…

  • Demonstrating Value From Sponsorships

    A major challenge exists in sponsorships. They are typically long-term and don’t lead to immediate sales, so how can a marketer demonstrate value from sponsorships? MASB, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, tackles this problem in their new book — Sponsorship Accountability. Demonstrating Value From Sponsorships One of the challenges with sponsorship accountability is that there…

  • Helping Experts Perform Consistently

    I have recently read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It is a few years old now (2009) but it still has a lot to say about the way the world works as well as Gawande’s aim of helping experts perform consistently. Do Experts Really Need Checklists? Gawande is a doctor and his main area of…

  • Must Firms Maximize Shareholder Value?

    What is the purpose of a firm? Given we have so many firms and business schools are such a sizable chunk of many universities, you might think that we all agree what firms are for. You would be wrong. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the purpose of firms. What are they…

  • Working In the Doughnut

    Kate Raworth has a popular book on sustainability and economics. In it, she argues that economics needs an overhaul. It is an admirably ambitious book with some flaws but with excellent parts to more than makeup for them. What does Raworth say about working in the doughnut? How To Understand Working In the Doughnut Raworth…

  • Signaling And Selection

    As I have discussed before there seems a lot to learn about social interactions, and that includes markets, from biology. Scientists in that area have long thought about problems that concern markets. For example, how can selection work to change a population? Or how can you interpret messages when those sending the messages have an…

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