“It’s 2004 and you’re reading new writing on this website. Something must be terribly wrong. What year is it? Did you hit your head? Did I? Don’t worry. We writers may suffer delusions of personal grandeur, but this modest weblog is not the first step in some eventual resurrection of The Industry Standard. It’s not 1999 anymore. But there still is an Internet economy, as Google’s forthcoming IPO will remind everyone. Why not look at that economy with the Standard’s logo smiling at the top of the page?”

“What really goes on in the back rooms of car dealerships across America? What does the car salesman do when he leaves you sitting in a sales office and goes to talk with his boss? What are the tricks salespeople use to increase their profit and how can consumers protect themselves from overpaying? These were the questions we, the editors at Edmunds.com, wanted to answer for our readers… We hired Chandler Phillips, a veteran journalist, to go undercover by working at two new car dealerships in the Los Angeles area.”

“Leadership is the global obsession. Thousands of recent booksómany of them best sellers — have dissected the leadership styles of great leaders from Jesus to Jefferson. Business writers, too, have joined the frenzy. The trouble is, much of the business literature on leadership — unlike the broader literature on the subject — starts with the assumption that leaders are rational beings. In part, that’s because readers come to these business books for advice, so they get suggestions on how to imitate the conscious motivations, behaviors, and choices of role models. Advice books are hardly likely to focus heavily on leaders’ irrational side — and still less likely to suggest that the role models’ successes may even stem from their psychological frailties.”