Great leaders make all the difference. In business, we see the impact of great leaders such as Tony Hsieh, who took the helm of online shoe retailer Zappos.com from founder Nick Swinmurn. Under Hsieh’s leadership, the company grew from $1.6 million in sales in 2000 to more than $1 billion in sales…

News Analysis Clockwise from bottom left: Kait and John Seyal and their dogs, Grace and Max, on the C&O Canal Towpath in western Maryland; Tyler Coulson with his dog, Mabel, in a dry lake bed near the California-Nevada line; Kait and Max above I-15 in Nevada; Jonathon Stalls took a break on Highway…

I always knew I’d be successful. Yep, just out of college and I’ve got my first job, and what a job it is: I’m a Social Media Community Manager for a B2B SaaS company. What is a Social Media Community Manager? Oh sorry, I didn’t hear you over the sound of how hip my job is. I’m responsible for…

A first viewing revealed that there's one obvious way to enjoy "I'm Not There," which opens in L.A. on Nov. 21, and that's to chase the references. The movie is a homage to 1960s art films, a meditation on mediated identity, and a lovechild of pop and the avant-garde. But it's also a game. The…

DADU SHIN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE When I was 18, I became friends with a writer who was in his early 30s, and I asked him one day what he was reading. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve gotten to the stage where I’ve started re-reading.” Oh, dear, I thought, I guess he’s run out of books. I felt a little sorry…

As they pursued hang gliding history on a July day over Texas, Jonny Durand, foreground, and Dustin Martin were often in sight of each other. Credit Courtesy of Jonny Durand T HE CLOUDS stretched across the Texas sky like a highway. And soaring along those lanes, lofted nearly 8,000 feet by the hot…

The Grateful Dead in San Francisco, in 1970. “Our audience is like people who like licorice,” Jerry Garcia said. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” Photograph by Robert Altman / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty One night in the winter of 1996, Rob…

October 23, 2012 October 23, 2012 (Washington) — More than eight in ten Americans ages 16-29 read a book in the past year, and six in ten used their local public library. Many say they are reading more in the era of digital content, especially on their mobile phones and on computers. These findings…

Meet your newest management headache: the co-branded employee. A growing number of professionals are using social media to build a personal, public identity—a brand of their own—based on their work. Think of an accountant who writes a widely read blog about auditing, or a sales associate who has…

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Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day.…

In 1970, a Zambia -based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger , then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center , in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars . Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of…

The TV show Seinfeld , which reigned as the most popular sitcom for most of the 1990s, inspired many a workplace water-cooler conversation with its quirky characters and hilarious, often absurd plots. Although the show might not seem the most likely source of practical advice, some of its most…

Flickr/Incase. A recent study published in an American Psychological Association journal, Emotion , suggests that early birds are generally happier than night owls. More than 700 respondents, ranging from ages 17 to 79, were surveyed and asked about their emotional state, health, and preferred time…

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before…

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid Now that the wave of e-book conversion is well underway or done at many publishing companies, publishers are focusing their digital attention on an old problem: marketing and selling books. In the e-book era, the old ways of…

I magine you have a brother and he’s an alcoholic. He has his moments, but you keep your distance from him. You don’t mind him for the occasional family gathering or holiday. You still love him. But you don’t want to be around him. This is how I lovingly describe my current relationship with the…

SundayReview | Opinion Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement JULY 21, 2012 I WORK on retirement policy, so friends often want to talk about their own retirement plans and prospects. While I am happy to have these conversations, my friends usually walk away feeling worse — for good reason.…

I was reading The Armed Forces Officer (not my normal reading but Colin Powell called it “ one of the best leadership books I’ve ever read “) and I came across a list of 13 ways to make sure you won’t get along with people. This list sure made me stop and think about mistakes I’ve made during my…

U.S. soldiers receive refreshments, including doughnuts, from an American Red Cross clubmobile in London. Soldiers today still resent a Red Cross move to charge for doughnuts. Library of Congress A lot of the online services you probably use are free. Gmail is free. Facebook is free. Yahoo News and…

Back in my graduate school days, hardly any critic of American literature was more influential than David Reynolds, and his magnum opus Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) became one of those touchstone texts that helped a lot of us imagine a way forward into our own scholarly pursuits. In that…

Melissa Moseley/HBO Aaron Sorkin on the set of “The Newsroom.” LOS ANGELES — When we last left Aaron Sorkin, he was discussing the creation of his coming HBO series, “The Newsroom.” In these final excerpts from that conversation, in his office at the studio here, Mr. Sorkin (who is the subject of an…

Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times Aaron Sorkin in Los Angeles. LOS ANGELES — A new one comes every few years, like a presidential election or the Olympic Games: an Aaron Sorkin television series set in a high-pressure work environment. “The Newsroom,” which will have its HBO debut on June 24, is…

Technology JUNE 2, 2012 An audience member is on Twitter during a talk by Twitter official, Claire Díaz-Ortiz. Allison V. Smith for The New York Times Why are some tweets more popular than others? When a Twitter staff member set out to answer that question 10 months ago, he thought the answer would…

Cookie Monster is most definitely a Chaos Muppet Richard Termine/PBS.org. Every once in a while, an idea comes along that changes the way we all look at ourselves forever. Before Descartes, nobody knew they were thinking. They all believed they were just mulling. Until Karl Marx, everyone totally…

Remember, if you can, the dark world we lived in around fifteen years ago. Web companies like Pets.com flared like a fireworks display on the Nasdaq, only to vanish just as quickly. Search engines crawled the digital superhighway in squads, each with its own extra-special method, and you never knew…

How often do you intentionally push yourself to discomfort? I know that sounds a little nutty, but here’s why I ask: Subjecting yourself to stress is the only way to systematically get stronger — physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. And you’ll get weaker if you don’t. We live by the…

In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic." Whatever that means. If you find yourself resisting being…

SundayReview | Opinion The Rise of the New Groupthink JAN. 13, 2012 SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in…

My colleague Dorothy Pomerantz notes that this weekend, the re-issued 3-D version of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace , pulled down about $23 million in the Box Office over the weekend. This got my mind to pondering the mistakes that people make, ranging from making the Star Wars prequels to reissuing…

I’ve just completed my article about responsive design in higher education. It will be published in University Business in a couple of months (February 2012 issue). I did a few extensive interviews with early adopters as part of my research for this piece. As usual, I could only use a fraction of…

As I explained in the first post on this series about responsive web design in higher education , I interviewed a few early adopters of the responsive web design approach as part of my research for an upcoming column in University Business. After Stewart Foss , eduStyle Awards founder and the…