marc acito

"Don't compete with rivals, make them irrelevant." So say W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, authors of the book, Blue Ocean Strategy, a paradigm-shifting look at building your business. "In today's overcrowded industries," they write, "competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody 'red...

It was just three years ago that Australian Rhonda Byrne revealed the not-so-little secret of The Secret. Critics scoffed at the Law of Attraction, but it generated sales of 19 million. Today, with at least that many Americans unemployed, Byrne's ideas aren't so attractive anymore. According to...

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with your extended family only costs $43.47, which only seems possible if you outsource your meal to India. What's more, that figure doesn't include hidden costs like alcohol. Or Valium. Or therapy.

Now that all of the government's recovery money is gone with no recovery in sight, you'd think that businesses would do anything to keep consumers, right? Tell that to the Starbucks manager who wouldn't let a customer get a refill because he stepped outside. Or the department at Bank of America...

Social networking: is it the key to success in the information age or a colossal waste of time? The prevailing opinion is that if you want to sell yourself or your product you have to blog, tweet, share, blab, carp, bill and coo so you can be liked, dugg, hugged, diddled or snagged. Whoever gets...

It's official: the chicken came before the egg. At least that's the finding of British researchers at Sheffield University. But here in Portland, Ore., we've known for years what comes first: the coop. Portland ordinances allow residents to keep three chickens (or ducks or rabbits or pygmy...

Irving Fields has got to be one in a million. Consider the statistics. Of the 5.7 million Americans over the age of 85, only 33% are men, totaling 3.8 million. Of those, roughly 5% of them still work. That's 190,000 guys over 85 still in the labor force. But how many of them play the piano...

The other night I was sharing -- okay, whining -- about yet another long and possibly futile day spent writing a spec project that may or may not sell when my partner asked: "What did you expect?" I was stunned -- partly because I didn't know the answer, partly because what I wanted him to say...

A week doesn't seem to go by without my getting an e-mail like this: "I've sent out a million resumes for jobs I'm overqualified for, paying money that will barely cover my dog food bills and I don't get a nibble. Clearly I'm meant to be doing something else, but what?" Perhaps we all need to...

The unemployment stats from the recent Pew Research Center report sound dire -- young adults and minorities hit hardest, middle-aged men pushed out of the marketplace, older Americans working into their sunset years -- but there's always an upside. So for inspiration I've been talking to some...