“The battle over digital music is just another verse in Apple’s sad song: This astonishingly imaginative company keeps getting muscled out of markets it creates. So what does Apple have to tell us about innovation?”

“In ‘Managing Project Uncertainty — From Variation to Chaos’ (M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Winter 2002), three business school professors describe a continuum of risk onto which they say every project falls. Take this quiz, created by Baseline, to find out what risks your project faces — and what management techniques you’ll need to combat them.”

“Five years ago, several executives at McKinsey & Company, America’s largest and most prestigious management-consulting firm, launched what they called the War for Talent. Thousands of questionnaires were sent to managers across the country. Eighteen companies were singled out for special attention, and the consultants spent up to three days at each firm, interviewing everyone from the C.E.O. down to the human-resources staff.”

“If you know a distinctive fact about a number not listed here, please e-mail me. Divisors, algebra, primes, sums of powers, powers/polygonal, matrices, graphs, combinatorics, Fibonacci, digits, perfect/amicable, bases, repdigits, geometry…”