Tell It To Al

Rob Kaplan, former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, says don’t put money first and if you have someone over a barrel, don’t take advantage.

Kaplan left Goldman in 2006  before it became branded the “great vampire squid.” He’s now a Harvard Business School professor and is out with a new book, “What To Ask The Person In the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming A More Effective Leader And Reaching Your Potential.”

For all the bad press Goldman gets for it’s dealings amid America’s economic collapse, a firm that size can’t be all bad. And Kaplan was either smart enough or lucky enough to leave long before Wall Street’s collapse in the fall of 2008. He’s taken the good he found at Goldman and is sharing it with hundreds of CEOs and business leaders.

He looks at things the old fashioned way: Work hard on what you do, work hard on providing value to the customer, and the money will follow. Companies that put money first are destined for folly when hard times hit – as history has shown.

Click here to read my column on Kaplan on MarketWatch.

Chances are, you’ve been to Zillow.com to check out the value of your home, only to be left wondering whether Zillow was wrong or you were in denial about what your house was worth.

Now, Zillow itself has been valued on the stock market in an initial public offering.  So what’s Zillow really worth?

Click here to get my “Alstimate” in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

Financial fraud has become so endemic in our culture that even the cops are doing it, too.

A report from the office that oversees the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office suggests that steep  cuts in overtime – necessitated by the financial crisis – are behind a recent spike in deputies committing serious financial crimes,  such as mortgage fraud and insurance fraud. Click here to read the report.

And click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Meet Ted Karkus, the Cold-Eeze guy.

Karkus is the CEO of ProPhase Labs, a small, publicly traded company with a big consumer-branded product.

Cold-Eeze, on store shelves everywhere, is advertised as “clinically proven” to shorten the duration of colds.

Some people swear by it. Others say it doesn’t work.

Karkus has bet a good portion of his life on it – moving from an investor in the company to it’s CEO after a proxy battle with the company’s founder and previous management.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” has got be one of the worst books I’ve ever tried to read.

That she did most of her writing under the effects of amphetamine explains much of the reason why.

And that so many people consider her work a philosophical road map for free markets shows how shallow some of us have been in thinking about capitalism.

Click here to read more in my column  in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

I can’t believe that people are still complaining about the boss – and even loving a movie about killing the boss – in an era of prolonged high unemployment.

Yes, I know. Bosses are rarely the most sensitive people. But anyone who has been out of a job for the past two years would love to have a boss to complain about.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And feel free to post your bad boss story here so maybe some of those without jobs can envy you.

A special thanks to readers for writing one of my columns while I went on vacation to Italy for a couple weeks.

I appreciate all their great insights on the bailouts and where the economy is really headed.

One of my favorite lines came from Julaine Barribeau of Wausau, Wisc.: “Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations has reached the levels of corruption that now are untouchable.”

Click here to read more of what my readers said.

Meantime, I had a great time rummaging through the ruins of Ancient Rome.

They’re reminders that economies and civilizations are often destroyed by the people who run them.

They’re also monuments to the hope that even after the worst has happened, there’s always a remnant from which to build anew.

Every once in a while, I meet an entrepreneur with a solution so obvious, I have to stop and wonder why it isn’t being done already.

Manhattan real estate developer Percy Pyne is one of those guys.

Pyne, the founder of American Feeder Lines, wants to reopen the Marine Highway along America’s coastline from Halifax to Houston.

He says his service will ease truck traffic on the nation’s highways, reduce fuel consumption, ease carbon emissions and create tens of thousands of jobs.

America long abandoned short-haul shipping along its coasts, primarily because trucking had been more efficient. But with crumbling highways and rising fuel costs, Pyne says we’ll go back to moving things the way we used to.

After all, most of the nation’s great cities evolved along water ways.

“We started on the water, and we’ll go back to the water,” Pyne said.

Click here to read my column on Fox Business.

How do you write a whole book about one word with only two letters?

My old college journalism professor Allan Metcalf has done it with “OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word,” recently published by Oxford University Press Inc.

How many times a  day do you say “OK”? The word started off as a newspaperman’s joke in the 1800s and is now the most widely used word on the planet, Metcalf says.

It’s also one of the most honest words you’ll hear. If someone says a product or service is OK, the assertion is rarely challenged. In fact, the word is so fundamentally honest, it has rarely proven useful for marketers and advertisers.

Click here to read more in my column on MarketWatch.

Imprisoned former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s lawsuit demanding access to a work-release program brings to mind a slew other other jailed executives wasting away in America’s prison.

If only we could let Bernie Madoff,  Bernie Ebbers and Jeffrey Skilling out of their cells to a little work once in a while. Think of the problems they could solve.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.