I had a meeting last week with an organization in the desert at the foot of a mountain. Just a plain brick building in a small office park. But inside, there's a hotbed of innovation. And they’re facing a challenge I see more and more in effective companies today: they’re really good at what they do and they are trying to figure out how to scale it. Their core business involves community mental and physical health services. They do that well and can’t help themselves—they are always…

When a team of people sit down in a company today, the conversation is much less likely to be “What’s our strategy?” and much more likely to be “How are we going to become more innovative?” This is because it’s getting increasingly hard to win by setting a strategy and sticking to it. Not that innovation is easy either. But companies know they have no choice…

The long-discussed and reviewed merger of American Airlines and USAir has finally gone through. It is the latest in a series of bankruptcies and mergers that have turned twelve airlines into four .

Mergers have a very bad record in general because more often than not, they fail to deliver achieve expected benefits. Airline mergers have an even tougher time because the industry struggles to…

There’s a wonderfully thoughtful new article by James Saft at the International Financing Review about a recent Fed examination of rise of both corporate cash levels and intangible capital.

It seems that

“Using a new measure, we show that intangible capital is the most important firm-determinant of corporate cash holdings. Our measure accounts for almost as much of the secular…