Dan Erwin

Gawker, Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel

One of the most perceptive essays I’ve ever read on celebrity culture and journalism also delivered a number of guffaws. The writer, Stephen Marche, who is a contributing editor to Esquire, holds nothing back.

Here’s his first column paragraph from the NYTimes: I HAVE been attacked pretty much my entire career by Gawker. I made its list of “least important writers” twice, and it put me in 62nd place on its “worst 100 white men” list, which also included...

A Stupidity-Based Theory of Management

I kid you not. That’s the actual title of research reported in the Journal of Management Studies. One of the authors, Mats Alvesson, has a long history of ground-breaking research. And this is another feather in his cap. Not quirky, it’s really, really smart and very useful research.

This is one of those studies which tell you more than you want to know about how organizations actually work. The researchers don’t screw around. They nail organizational BS to the wall. What’s unique about the research are...

Intelligence Is About Stories, Not Just IQ or EQ

It’s the smart folk that do well in business. At least that’s what we’re told—and I suspect that to some degree it’s true. But if it’s the smart folk, what really is smarts? Or, to put it in a more academic framework: what is intelligence?

Cognitive psychologists have played around with these issues for decades and they’ve arrived at similar conclusions. Typical is that of Harvard’s well-known Howard Gardner, who first captured my attention in 1983 with his study of “Multiple Intelligences:” To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail