Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Business people

What Lives After: Remembering Five Who Died This Week

Shakespeare’s immortal eulogy delivered by Mark Anthony for Julius Caesar resonates this week: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” We lost five remarkable men from different parts of the world. Four of them made the planet an immeasurably better place. One devoted his life to [...]

One more thing: Real artists ship.

In preparation for landing at SFO, I had closed the MacBook Air and turned off the iPad, but as I touched down, my iPhone beeped. The text from my son made my heart sink: Steve Jobs died . At least three people left the plane in tears. I felt like someone had unplugged my compass. Steve Jobs [...]

Get Well, Steve

A quick search will verify that JamSideDown has both criticized and admired Steve Jobs more than any other CEO. I dislike his high control business strategy and personality but I think that he is America’s finest CEO and that every leader should study his public presentations. He embodies “the intersection of liberal arts and technology” [...]

Inside Job: Charles Ferguson Brings his Camera Home

Charles Ferguson has done it again. His second film, Inside Job is a good movie and an extremely important one. Whether you enter the theater Democrat or Republican, you will leave it ready to man the barricades against Wall Street. You will also leave the theater much smarter: despite an MBA and more than a [...]

Chance Favors the Connected Mind

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a very insightful article by Steve Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, which argues that video games and TV shows are actually making us smarter and The Ghost Map, which chronicles the heroic efforts of John Snow to prove that London’s terrifying 19th century cholera epidemics were [...]

Ben Horowitz: High Tech’s New Andy Grove

If Silicon Valley is rich, how come it ain’t smart? How is it that we consistently generate innovative companies but rarely produce management thinkers of consequence? Part of the problem is that many technology leaders are neurotic. They need to be: nobody really knows what is going to work and your idea will most likely [...]