Morning Advantage: Will Hadoop Smarts Make Sears Rich?

Among the select few to address the 6,000 faithful with tales from the leading edge of data analytics at this June’s Hadoop conference will be Netflix, Yahoo — and Sears. For three years, AdAge reports, Sears has been using Hadoop to get a handle on the 100 million customers in its…

Morning Advantage: A Supply Chain Solution to an Age-Old Problem

Time after time, three issues continue to bedevil global flood relief efforts — lack of advance preparation, lack of attention to floods too small to grab the international spotlight, and lack of economic recovery efforts after the waters abate. Here in the Guardian, two business…

Morning Advantage: Ben Stiller’s Search for Digital Gold

Will Holllywood figure out how to use the Internet to generate the big bucks? You have to go way, way down this Fast Company article to find much revenue to speak of. As comedians like Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Cera start production companies to develop and sell original content to…

Morning Advantage: The Job Interview You Don’t Know You’re Having

A San Francisco start-up called Gild has created a program that evaluates and scores software developers on the work they’ve publicly released on the web, Technology Review reports. It’s happening unbeknownst to the programmers and without their permission. This is a boon to recruiters, clearly,…

Morning Advantage: Putting an End to Corruption

In 2010, the U.N. estimates, some $1.5 trillion in bribes wiped out more than 5% of global GDP. And by 2015, this Foreign Affairs article predicts, the total value of goods lost to counterfeiting and piracy will balloon from 2008′s $650 billion to $1.77 trillion.

But businesses could fight back in…

Morning Advantage: Have Mickey and Minnie Saved the Rain Forests?

For years, environmental activists had been making little headway in their efforts to stop Asia Pulp and Paper from destroying the habitats of the orangutans and Sumatran tigers, reports the Christian Science Monitor. But that all changed when they switched tack and targeted, not the company…

Morning Advantage: Ordering Up Creativity

“Watching today’s generals discuss how to improve leadership development is a little like watching dinosaurs discuss how to evolve,” complains veteran Washington Post and WSJ military correspondent Thomas Ricks, in this withering commentary in Foreign Policy. Essentially, he says, the report boils…

Morning Advantage: Heavy Metal Management

It was only a matter of time before someone would wonder: Can rock music be a metaphor for business? That time came in 2010, reports The Guardian, when two aging Swedish financiers attended Freak Guitar summer camp in bucolic Härsjösand outside Gothenburg. The result, Heavy Metal Management, was…

Morning Advantage: Heavy Metal Management

It was only a matter of time before someone would wonder: Can rock music be a metaphor for business? That time came in 2010, reports The Guardian, when two aging Swedish financiers attended Freak Guitar summer camp in bucolic Härsjösand outside Gothenburg. The result, Heavy Metal Management, was…

Morning Advantage: Beating Your Brother at His Own Game

Manu Chandaria, CEO of Comcrat, the multibillion-dollar Kenyan steel, plastics, and aluminum company, is a longtime observer of the African business landscape. His views in this Wharton interview are well worth reading in their entirely. He’s bullish, for instance, on Nigeria, and thinks Western…