In June 1989, Donald Trump picked up a copy of Business Week magazine and read an article. Genesco, a footwear company, was in trouble. The banks had insisted on the appointment of a new chief executive. They had settled on John Hanigan, a turnaround artist best known as an asset stripper. In The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz describes Hanigan in Donald Trump’s words: “He came to companies...
The year was 1497 and Leonardo da Vinci was working on a fresco in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The fresco was only 460cm by 880cm but da Vinci’s reconstruction of the Last Supper still wasn’t complete after two years of work. A prior at the monastery wrote to the artist to complain about the delay. How could one small part of one wall take so long to paint, he demanded. Da...
It was the world’s least expected fight—and the least expected victory. On one side was the President of the United States and his online campaign guru, Brad Parscale. On the other side were some teenage K-pop fans and TikTok users. One was the leader of the free world with a nuclear arsenal and a multi-million dollar professional organization. The other was a mixture of well-meaning young people...
It was December 2007, and Noah Kagan was facing a challenge. Recently fired from the marketing team at Facebook, where he had been the company’s thirtieth employee, he was keen to show his new boss that he could be an asset. But Aaron Pitzer wasn’t going to make it easy for him. The co-founder of new finance site Mint.com told Kagan that he had high expectations. Kagan would become the Marketing...
In early 1913, the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky was wrestling with a problem. He had returned from Moscow the previous December and he wanted to portray in a painting the “extremely powerful impressions” he had experienced in the city. Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract art so he played with form and lines and colors to re-create what he had felt in Russia’s capital and could recall of his...
The footage is remarkably clear. We see a room with a plush chair and a floral-patterned sofa, paneled walls, and orchids on the windowsill. A young man in loose sweatpants and a burgundy Harvard sweater looks briefly around the room. He fiddles quickly with something in the corner of the room before surreptitiously stuffing a white box into his back pocket. Finally, he adjusts the hidden camera...
In June 2017, Time, themagazine known for its person of the year, released a list of the 25 most influential people on the planet. The newly-crowned Donald Trump was there, as were Matt Drudge, J.K. Rowling, and K-Pop band BTS. Also on the list, though, was Ser Amantio di Nicolao—not the minor character in the Puccini opera Gianni Schicchi but the pseudonym of Virginian Steven Pruitt, a records...
It should have been a straightforward event. The Israeli embassy in Berlin wanted to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day with a talk by Zvi Herschel, a Holocaust survivor. He’d tell the audience his experiences and keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. It was typical of the kind of work that embassies around the world do. But it was the age of the coronavirus. The ambassador had tested positive and...
In 2008, Mark Hemsworth, a Canadian manager in the restaurant and retail industry, headed for the jungle. He took a position with Engineers Without Borders and worked with Forest Fruits Ltd., a company that buys honey from 5,000 farmers in remote areas of Zambia. As he traveled across the country, he noticed that what prevented rural entrepreneurs from growing their businesses was a lack of...
In 2019, the Miami Heat NBA team wanted to know which of its services most satisfied its season ticket holders. The franchise believed that if it knew what drove fans to renew their memberships it could boost renewals and increase its income. It had options. The team could have simply handed out a survey and asked its fans to score from one to five a list of the benefits they enjoyed as season...
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