The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply..

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perenn….

Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubb….

Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most pa….

No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complex….

One of the problems that exacerbates procrastination is the feeling that you have lots of different things to do and no clear sense of which matter m….

To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you'll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately,….

Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they'….

Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy..

Companies have long gathered data to break down their customer base into specific segments. Now political parties have become adept at micro-targetin….

What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the mar….

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. S….

Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants these policies ….

Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for ….

Companies, like people, don't much like to change..

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive edit….

Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to inve….

In the auto industry, there's one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster..

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer ma….

Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players,….

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most peop….