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Here are five choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms to start off your work week. I'm pointing you to articles about day traders, succeeding in hard times, Blockbuster, partnerships, and strategy.

From the NY Times: Day Traders 2.0: Wired, Angry and Loving It
"REMEMBER the day traders? They were hard to miss during the tech-stock mania a decade ago, when the Nasdaq seemed like a casino built by morons and a chimp with darts could pick winners. You would hear about these guys — nearly all of them were guys — and wonder: Could anyone make a living this way? And if the answer was yes, why were the rest of us suckers still holding down regular jobs? No doubt, it’s been a long time since a question like that troubled your imagination. And perhaps you assumed that the twin calamities of the Internet crash and the Great Recession had doomed the day-trader species in the unruly jungle of American capitalism. But some dreams refuse to die, and few, it seems, are more resilient than the dream of beating the market while wearing nothing but tighty-whities."

Wally's Comment: David Segal has written a great piece about day traders today. You may have thought they were extinct, but no. Look for two things in this piece. It's about people doing something they love to do. And, changes in technology have given them a new business model where income from trading is only one revenue stream.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail: Lululemon rides out recession in quality fashion
"While many clothiers cut prices to entice cash-strapped shoppers, the yoga-centered chain improved quality and expanded range."

Wally's Comment: Lululemon makes a product that is a discretionary purchase. Supposedly, companies like that take a real hit in a recession. The conventional wisdom is that they should scale back, lay off, and hunker down to await better days. This company did things very differently.

From Forbes: What Blockbuster Video Can Teach Us About Economics
"The great Austrian School economist Ludwig Von Mises once wrote that the entrepreneur who fails to use his capital to the "best possible satisfaction of consumers" is "relegated to a place in which his ineptitude no longer hurts people's well-being." Von Mises meant that successful businesses are successful because they fill an unmet need. If they're unsuccessful, it is often because they have failed the consumer. In that case bankruptcy is an economic good for relieving those the market has left for dead of any further capital to destroy."

Wally's Comment: In general, John Tamny is heir to the Austrian economists he quotes, by which I mean that he makes sense, without the need for equations to muddle things. This article is a good explanation of why Blockbuster is now spiraling down the drain. But there's more than an economics lesson here. There are lessons about strategy, vigilance, and response to change.

From the Gallup Management Journal: Don't Go It Alone
"Our culture is beguiled by individual achievers -- the CEO, the movie star, the MVP. But the fact is, none of us work alone, and we all do better when we work with others. Even Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen."

Wally's Comment: This is an interview with Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, authors of Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships in Work and in Life. Whether you read the book or not, you will get value from this interview. After, to quote Kip Tindell, CEO of the Container Store: "Team is one of the most beautiful of all human experiences."

From HBS Working Knowledge: One Strategy: Aligning Planning and Execution
"Every firm has two strategies, we learn early on in the pages of One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making."Explicit" strategy is the one you read about in your company's planning memos and PowerPoint slides. The second, "implicit" strategy, is what emerges when middle managers and line employees attempt to execute the explicit strategy."

Wally's Comment: In a way, this piece stretches Chris Argyris' "Theory Espoused vs. Theory in Use" to fit an analysis of strategy. The important point is that the two strategies are often different. One reason for the difference usually is that the official strategy is not clean and understood. When I was doing the research for my next book, Ruthless Focus, I discovered that the most successful strategies, long term, are simple. Simplicity closes the gap between strategy and execution. They're also strategies that companies stay with until there's a reason to change. Staying with a strategy means people don't have to keep learning new things to do, they can spend their creativity on getting better at things they already do.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.