Over the past decade and a half the U.S. economy has weathered two significant recessions, including crises in the residential real estate and financial services industries. Despite these economic hardships the self-employed and “solopreneur” workforce grew by 4.3 million workers and is projected to continue growing at double-digit rates. Continue reading
Category Archives: Business
A New Era for Global Leadership Development
Great advice from Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic || "A New Era for Global Leadership Development" ow.ly/9clts #leadership—
Marshall Stanton (@marshallstanton) February 21, 2012
Warren Buffett: Why stocks beat gold and bonds
In an adaptation from his upcoming shareholder letter, the Oracle of Omaha explains why equities almost always beat the alternatives over time. By Warren Buffett FORTUNE — Investing is often described as the process of laying out money now in the expectation of receiving more money in the future. At Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) we take a more demanding approach, defining investing as the transfer to others of purchasing power now with the reasoned expectation of receiving more purchasing power — after taxes …
Geek-out Sunday part XXII: autonomous quadrotor swarms
The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater) has produced a number of fascinating experiments lately focused on the uses of quadrotor helicopter robots. Four-propeller aircraft designs were popularized in the 1920s and 1930s to help solve some of the persistent issues with vertical flight (i.e., torque-control). Continue reading
Internet usage in 2012
Ever since I first got onto the Internet in the late 1980s and involved in its commercialization in the early 1990s I’ve seen year after year of brilliant (and sometimes silly) innovation and growth. It should be no surprise that pundits the world over are looking to 2012 to be yet another record-setting year wherein more people get online and stay online in ways that are well understood and some that may emerge before our very eyes (Pinterest, anyone?). Continue reading
Great moments are born from great opportunity
A colleague of mine sent me this video ahead of a quarterly meeting we conducted with our entire business unit and it started me thinking about the nature of opportunity. From where are great opportunities born? Continue reading
Wikipedia blackout
Now that SOPA and PIPA are effectively dead (okay, shelved but not actually dead), it is worth circling back and looking at what the world would look like without some of the sites that have transformed the Internet. For example, YouTube announced yesterday that it is streaming over four billion videos a day - a figure that is up 25% from just eight months ago. Continue reading
Stop SOPA and PIPA

I’m not going to rehash what is already getting a tremendous amount of press today, but as of midnight several of the leading Internet services and destinations have “gone on strike” to protest the proposed Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Continue reading
Movies as business metaphors
If you’ve spent enough time working in the corporate world, you’ve likely been subjected to thousands of business metaphors and clichés. Some of the very best (and worst) examples of these abstractions are illustrated by often questionable clips from popular movies (which are frequently used out of context). Continue reading
Get hired!
Aside
Skip to the end of this article and read the section called "How to Win the Interview" ow.ly/8wSJu—
Marshall Stanton (@marshallstanton) January 17, 2012






