To continue the theme of trust, I was mulling over different reasons we have to trust other people. We talk quite often about ethics, integrity, even a moral compass. But what do those things mean, and how do we exhibit them to the people we work with, and negotiate with? History is a part of [...]

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There have been a number of comments on my post about trust, written after four weeks in China, where the word comes up a lot, and in response to a speech by Steven M. R. Covey at the SIIA Content Forum. Charlie Terry kindly provided some phrases from a real contract that show just how [...]

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After a long meeting with Bob Costanza, director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, on Friday, Rachel and I stopped in Montpelier, the lovely capital of Vermont,1 to see Ethan Atkin, whose company Cranbury International handles our budding sales in India and Latin America. Ethan’s father was a publisher [...]

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I love visiting Vermont, and today couldn’t have been better because the sun came out and the daffodils were blooming. Here’s a photo from the visitors’ center just after you enter the Vermont from Massachusetts (double-click for full-size view). It’s a little strange that so-called Taxachusetts has nothing like this – a huge barn-like building [...]

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WordPress is a wonderful and terrifying system, keeping all my draft post titles on the dashboard along with a count (which started at over 50 when we may the changeover but is now down to 3–I’m being much tidier these days, with WordPress keeping score). I meant to post this list of language resolutions at [...]

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I was 19 when I first went to England,and my best friend Roxanne Teske came over for six months. She Eurailed while I studied for Oxbridge, and we explored Devon and the Lake District, hitchhiking during a summer when it seemed to pour with rain constantly (that’s one thing global warming has changed). When Roxanne [...]

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A subject we’ve done extensive work on but don’t talk about much is criminal justice. David Levinson has written on aggression and violence, cross-culturally, and also was editor-in-chief of the first Sage Reference title, the Encyclopedia of Crime & Punishment. How odd that I should just talking to a law professor about editing a single [...]

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Speaking of brands, I was startled recently to see a type of deodorant called Tsunami, which to me is a bit like naming something Hurricane Katrina (I realize that tsunamis are a natural phenomenon, but nonetheless . . .). And I know that’s how we felt immediately after “the” tsunami. I was standing in line [...]

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Making use – let alone sense – of today’s deluge of User-Generated Content (I’ve capped it, having just heard the acronym UGC) is a huge business challenge. I’ve been pondering this as an editor and publisher – as, for example, we plan to produce a book from the submissions to Berkshire’s Love US or Hate [...]

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The weather improved dramatically the day I returned to the Berkshires. But it’s still cold in the hills, as our own Scott Eldridge shows. He went hiking in a part of the Berkshires called the Saddleback and within a short while was walking through a foot of snow, even though it was a warm, lovely [...]

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But it’s not hype. Skype really is transformative. I truly want everyone I work with (well, those I like–and that’s most almost all of them) to use this service, and only wish I could figure a way to get this kind of word of mouth promotion going for our encyclopedias. The VOIP is inconsistent and [...]

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While Berkshire is not really an “educational” publisher, one of the things I’ve been looking at since I got home last Thursday is our first book for teachers. It’s called This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, and it’s written by the brilliant and eloquent world historian, David Christian, who is enjoying a well-deserved [...]

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Liz met me at Logan Airport in Boston this morning and we got to catch up on the drive home. She’d gone into Boston to play mixed doubles squash with Preston (B. Quick) – a real relationship test, it seems to me! – so this worked out perfectly, and so did the fact that she [...]

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Global networking: I met Christine Loh in Beijing, when she spoke at the Economist Intelligence Unit’s breakfast meeting on 29 March, and when I visited her at Civic Exchange in Hong Kong last week she happened to mention Fora TV and promptly put me in touch with Brian Gruber, whom I was able to meet [...]

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I can’t imagine a better way to return to the United States, after nearly a month in China, than the four days I’ve just spent in San Francisco. It’s been an intense couple of days, not least because I haven’t been able to sleep more than a couple hours. But I haven’t had the usual [...]

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