UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

You emerge from the womb with no idea of how anything works and you look in their eyes for answers. Your parents.
How they respond in those early years is critical to how you view the world. I was taught by my father that it was dangerous. The world, that is.
I was taught I had [...]

The hardest thing about learning how to fly a plane is learning how to fly with instruments. And what makes that so challenging is that you have to abandon all of your instincts, forgo everything you have been taught to do to that point, and trust the invisible.
There you are flying through fog, through [...]

As the only biographer of Carl Icahn, Mark Stevens has watched Icahn morph himself from a Greenmailer/Corporate Raider to a Shareholder Activist over the span of several years. But it is Mark Stevens who has had endless conversations with Icahn at dinner and on the tennis court and he warns people not to turn their [...]

I gave a speech today to a group of business people who dutifully took their seats and hoped against hope that I would tell them something that would actually inform them. And although it was a leap of faith too grand to admit to themselves, I could read it in [...]

I am reading a NY Times story that zooms in on a question that has been waltzing around in my mind for weeks.
How did Citigroup get caught up to its eyeballs in subprime junk when one of the true wise men of the financial community, Robert Rubin, was embedded atop its management hierarchy? [...]