Edward Cone

Larry Ribstein wrote the book on disrespecting SOX. The Sarbanes-Oxley Debacle: What We’ve Learned; How to Fix It, coauthored with Henry Butler, is due out this summer from the conservative American Enterprise Institute Press. (Ribstein is a law professor at the University of Illinois; Butler is an economics professor at Chapman University.) Name an argument […]

The MBA Technology Gap Congratulations! Your new budget has just been approved and you can finally hire that newly minted MBA you’ve been clamoring for. So what, exactly, can your company expect in the way of technology management skills from this expensively pedigreed tyro? Good question. Employers—whether they are looking to place fresh talent on […]

Mark Lutchen has an idea for improving the technology component of business-school education, and it begins far from any MBA program. Curricula would be stronger if businesses did a better job of managing their own technology in the first place, says Lutchen, a longtime partner (and former CIO) of PricewaterhouseCoopers and author of Managing IT […]

While MBA schools look to blend technology into their business curricula, a parallel set of master’s degree programs aims to bring business skills to technology managers. At Northeastern University, in Boston, the High Technology MBA program works closely with area companies to enroll IT workers, who continue on the job while pursuing their degrees. “We […]

With gasoline prices high and likely to stay that way, fuel efficiency is chic again for the first time since the heyday of disco. But the trend toward hybrid cars and other abstemious vehicles poses a problem for states that derive much of their road maintenance and construction budgets from gas taxes. Lower gas consumption […]

Measuring return on investment from technology projects is an uncertain science. How, then, to determine return on noninvestment? It’s clear that Morgan Stanley didn’t do any favors for its retail brokerage unit—the old Dean Witter—by failing to modernize the computer systems that support the business. CEO John Mack talks about the need to catch up […]

Financial services firms want wealthy clients. And wealthy clients want the latest technology. In the short term, at least, this is not good news for Morgan Stanley’s retail unit, where a strategic drive to focus on upscale customers does not line up with its weak online presence and other lingering technology deficiencies. Like many of […]

It was yet another Saturday in the office for Robert, a broker at one of Wall Street’s most storied firms, Morgan Stanley. The simple job of printing out a portfolio summary for a client meeting was too much for the creaky computer system in his office to bear during regular working hours. “It got clogged […]

Almost everything about the new Boeing 787 is different—from the cutting-edge materials and electronics used to build the plane, to the technology used during the design and assembly process. It is so different, in fact, that even the Boeing Co. itself—a fixture in the global economy for nearly a century—is undergoing a radical transformation as […]

Collaboration across cultures and time zones can raise a host of issues about the way people work together, but sometimes the more obvious problems can mask other, more insidious stumbling blocks to productivity. And some of these problems are just as likely to happen close to home. That’s the conclusion of Karen Sobel Lojeski, CEO […]

These are tough times for conventional wisdom. Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, argues that popular culture is making us smarter. A decisive, long-term study reports that low-fat diets don’t make people healthier. And now there’s a paper by a pair of business-school professors who say that effective campaigns to stamp out […]

Dave Winer is a visionary of the user-driven Web. He is a software developer who made his name in the 1980s by contributing key elements to the Mac and PC operating systems. Winer was publishing his “Scripting News” Weblog in 1997, before the term “blog” was even coined, thus helping to define and popularize the […]