“If you haven’t read the newspapers or had access to news through any medium lately, Bob Lutz, General Motors vice chairman and popular blogger has been busy lately. We greatly appreciate the time he took to answer a few email questions we recently asked.”

“Online personal journals (weblogs or ‘blogs’) are becoming more popular with small businesses that see them as an inexpensive marketing tool and a way to differentiate themselves from the competition.”

“The Idea: The New Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You can’t learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new ‘channel’ for entrepreneurial education. Here’s how it might work.”

“The next time your boss complains you are not focused enough, blame it on email and phone calls. Even smoking dope has less effect on your ability to concentrate on the task in hand.”

“Great leadership is characterized by the desire and ability to grow the people around you. A great leader shifts his/her focus from delivering great results to developing others who can deliver great results. This is the only way that success is scalable and sustainable.”

“I’ve been using GTD principles for over three years now, mostly with good results. I believe the concepts are generally the best productivity approach for knowledge workers. There are times, however, when I think the model must be expanded to get the best results in a given situation.”

“If you are looking for a business school that teaches you how to think creatively, design new products and services, manage your innovations through a corporate bureaucracy, or present them to outside angel investors, Fontaine-bleau, France-based Insead, the leading European B-school, just outside Paris, may be just the place. Insead has joined with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., to offer a joint program that teaches the role of creativity in business decisions, how innovation really works, and why design may be as important to corporate management today as Six Sigma was in the ’90s. A Swiss trustee who sits on both boards brought them together.”

Part 1 of 4: “The stuff coming up focuses upon three things. I kept it to three things because it’s often said that in any given line of business you only need to know three things. The trick is in knowing which three. I don’t know how true that is, but I’m running with it. The ‘three things’ in the business of managing your boss are: 1) Understanding Yourself; 2) Understanding The Boss; 3) Understanding The Relationship. Sounds simple, eh? Like I mentioned earlier, it’s highly compressed.”

“Warning signs that the company you just joined is in serious trouble.”

“Don’t worry about who your customer is. Make something he can ‘hire’ to do a job.”

“Socrates is for people who seek their own solutions to everyday business and personal problems and opportunities and who share a fundamental desire to save money and time. We offer, through retailers, marketing partners and our Web site, a broad selection of do-it-yourself forms, kits, software, guides, books and completion services that help consumers and small businesses solve everyday legal, financial and business management matters.”

“Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.”

“Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

“I spend most of my work-life in meetings. Note-taking is a survival skill. Yet, I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings. Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better.”

“Seth says that you can get most of the value of an MBA education without forking over the big bucks by reading 30-40 books. I agree. In the context of learning useful knowledge that will make you a more productive and valuable employee, I maintain that you can educate yourself effectively for less than a quarter of the time and money spent in most current MBA programs… Here are the books (and blogs) that are a part of my ‘Personal MBA’ reading list. (Blogs and online resources are marked with a *.) Some are directly related to business, and some are included for a broader understanding of the world and how we live in it.”