“A blog called ‘Presentation Zen’ has generated a lot of buzz for a couple of posts that smugly satisfy what an audience wants to believe: Bill Gates and Visual Complexity and Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic. Readers feel righteous in the easy digs at Microsoft’s busy PowerPoint slides, particularly when compared to Jobs’ spare presentations. And when I first saw those posts, I thought, ‘Yeah! Spareness! Simplicity! Whoo!’ Bet then I wondered, ‘Um, isn’t Bill Gates worth a gajillion dollars? Isn’t Microsoft an exceedingly successful company? Should we maybe look at this a little differently?’”

“… it’s a huge mistake to equate executive blogs with business blogging, just as it’s a huge mistake to see the world only through the economic and culture lens of stars and hits (what I call ‘headism’). The best business blogs come from the employees, not the bosses. They have more time, and are less prone to marketing gobbledygook and gnomic platitudes. And those kind of blogs are on the rise, not the decline.”

“This is a first-person account of how IBM was able to con my execs out of millions of dollars. Gullible management tries to swim with the shark and gets chewed to pieces. Witness the exec-level FUD sales techniques and the $325/hr subcontractor labor bait and switch.” (Thanks Communication Nation!)

“CEO Jason Fried’s startup philosophy can be summed up in three short words: Keep it simple… We’re trying to underdo the competition, and do less than they’re doing to beat them. It’s a very Cold War mentality to keep trying to one-up everybody. We’re trying to ‘one-down’ people. “