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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 Patagonia, failure, measures of success, a company without a headquarters, and the World Cup.

From Entrepreneur: Patagonia, From the Ground Up
"While the rest of retail was tanking, Yvon Chouinard's outdoor clothing and gear company was having its best two years ever. Here's why."

Wally's Comment: This is a good article about how Patagonia came through the recession with flying colors. A lot is tied to their company values.

For some additional reading, you may enjoy two pieces on the working climate at Patagonia. There's "Working Life (High and Low)," from the NY Times and "The Art of Work," from Fast Company.

From SMU: Entrepreneurs share their formula for success: Failure
"Entrepreneurship is so often associated with risk-taking that in safety-seeking Singapore, it would be quite natural to assume a rather weak spirit of enterprise. Such an assumption, of course, would only be partly true. After all, successful entrepreneurs need to possess more than just an appetite for risk; they need to be skilled at harvesting talent, tapping on their networks and navigating around business environments. Can such successes be taught? Panelists at a recent forum seem to think so – but only to a limited extent. They draw distinctions between formulaic prescriptions and advice, saying that while there are no textbook solutions to follow, budding entrepreneurs would benefit from having access to mentors."

Wally's Comment: The big question is how much about entrepreneurship is teachable? In my own experience it seems that very few people who started a successful business did it on their first try.

For some additional reading, check out this piece from Dan Ariely titled, "Why Businesses Don't Experiment."

From WP Carey: Message for New Business Leaders: Profit and Personal Gain Alone are Insufficient Measures of Success
"Recently a senior executive at a large financial services firm struggled to answer whether the client's interests come first, reported Dean Robert Mittelstaedt of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University in his remarks at the convocation on May 13, 2010. What has happened to respect for customers, commitment to organizational purpose and advancement, making the right decision even if it does not maximize short term profit, he asked. The global trend away from a focus on excellence and organizational success to a focus on personal success is "dangerous and destructive," he said. He challenged the graduates to measure success by the progress made in society and their organizations. Make that your ultimate goal and personal success will follow, he said. 'Your leadership will differentiate you, your ethics will save you, and continuous learning will make you successful.'"

Wally's Comment: This post is worth a read even though it's weak on two counts. First, it's a call to virtue and I've noticed that virtue alone is rarely a persuasive argument. Second, there is the promise that success will follow virtue which doesn't seem to hold up when we review what happens in the world. More important here are the issues that are mixed into the speech. The title, after all is, "Lead Ethically and Innovate."

For some additional reading on metrics, read Ann Bares' nuanced post on "Rewards Metrics: Engagement versus the Bottom Line."

From Forbes: Why Companies Don't Need Headquarters
"Working remotely from home or at a customer's office can boost your business."

Wally's Comment: The key word in the teaser is "can." You have to determine the right solution for you and your organization. Nevertheless, this article is an excellent counterpoint to the recent Microsoft's "2010 Remote Working Survey." The survey findings are parsed very nicely by Skip Reardon at Six Disciplines.

To some extent, the move to having more and more people working outside a company's office is a creeping change that no one actually decided on. We seem to have awakened one morning and found that more people were working outside the office than we ever imagined.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail: The gospel of soccer
"Eighteen months before sending a crew of almost 200 to South Africa for its World Cup broadcasts, the U.S. sports cable network ESPN produced something it called the Soccer Summit. This was a much smaller affair, though in some ways just as momentous. Because in the fall of 2008, as network executives convened a kind of elite focus group at a loft in the Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan that included soccer reporters from the Associated Press and The New York Times, on-air announcers, and sports merchandisers like Adidas and Nike, the agenda touched on the future of broadcasting for the sport in the United States. Soccer may be the world’s most popular sport, but it remains a niche player in the U.S., and by some measures ESPN was already back on its heels."

Wally's Comment: This is a great piece about the upcoming World Cup and broadcasting and how businesses that aren't your competition still have an impact on what you do.

To help you stay on top of the World Cup, here's alink to a Google search.

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.