What to watch, listen to and read this month
— -- Business events to watch this month:
Sept. 8:President Obama outlines his program for creating jobs to a joint session of Congress. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks in Minneapolis on the U.S. economic outlook.
Sept. 14-16: The Interbike International Bicycle Expo, a bicycle industry convention, is held in Las Vegas. Last year's expo drew 24,000 attendees.
Sept. 15: Labor Department releases Consumer Price Index for August.
Sept. 20-21: The Federal Reserve's policy-making committee meets.
Sept. 21: A Senate Judiciary subcommittee holds a hearing examining Google and consumer and competition issues.
Sept. 29:Commerce Department releases its final estimate of U.S. gross domestic product for the second quarter.
On TV
2 Broke Girls
CBS; Sept. 19; 9:30 p.m.
A sassy waitress and a classy waitress try to make ends meet at a diner full of colorful characters … wait, is this Alice?
Not quite. For one thing, it's not the 1970s. And instead of waitresses Alice, Flo and Vera, we have financially strapped Max (the infinitely watchable Kat Dennings from Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), who also moonlights as a nanny, and Caroline (Beth Behrs), a fallen heiress who hatches a plan to raise $250,000 to launch a business based on Max's homemade cupcakes.
As a show, 2 Broke Girls has pedigreed parents in co-creators Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City) and comedian Whitney Cummings, a peerless director in James Burrows, whose sitcom career stretches back to the Alice era, and a promising pilot episode.
Long Distance Warrior
Public television; Sept. 13; 8 p.m. ET/PT (check local listings)
This inspirational, hour-long biography of MCI leader Bill McGowan pays posthumous homage to the driven competitor whose small Midwestern communications company successfully challenged the monopoly that was AT&T. Through interviews with colleagues and historians, we learn that McGowan was a chain-smoking workaholic whose management style was ahead of its time. He favored fewer layers, disliked bureaucracy, gave stock options to all employees and abandoned interoffice memos as soon as MCI Mail electronic messaging became available.
Colleagues laud McGowan as the quintessential American entrepreneur who disabused the country of the notion that long-distance calling was a luxury and sped up advances in cellphones and fiber-optic lines. "I would argue that Bill McGowan had a greater impact on telecommunications, not only in this country but worldwide, than Henry Ford did on the automobile industry," Dan Akerson, former MCI CFO and now CEO of General Motors, says in the documentary.
Books
Off Balance:
Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction
By Matthew Kelly (Hudson Street Press; $21.95; Sept. 15)
The reason work-life balance remains so elusive, says speaker/consultant Matthew Kelly, has a lot to do with verbiage.
"The term itself is fatally flawed," Kelly said in an interview. "You're essentially telling people that 'your work isn't part of your life,' and yet they spend most of their life working."
In Off Balance, Kelly puts the onus on individuals — not corporations, though they play a role — to achieve overall satisfaction in their lives, and provides steps to help them get there.
"If people say, 'I need work-life balance,' I find they're basically saying, 'I'm not living the life I want to live,'" Kelly says.
Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers
By Ellen Schultz (Portfolio; $26.95; Sept. 15)
This galling new book by Ellen Schultz of The Wall Street Journal argues that the elimination of company-sponsored pensions and reduction of retirement benefits have nothing to do with the recession or any other external factors and everything to do with employers, consultants and financial firms acting in cahoots to rob workers and benefit their own institutions.
18 Minutes: Find Your
Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right
Things Done
By Peter Bregman (Harvard Business Review; $24.99; Sept. 28)
Also in September
Eco-friendly soapmakers Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry share The Method Method: 7 Obsessions That Helped Our Scrappy Start-up Turn an Industry Upside Down (Portfolio, $26.95; Sept. 15).
In Take the Lead (Atria Books; $25; Sept. 13), the COO of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, Betsy Myers, writes about motivating, inspiring and bringing out the best in yourself and everyone around you.
And Accenture veteran Stephen Shapiro reveals why Best Practices are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition (Portfolio; $22.95; Sept. 29).
What can you do in 18 minutes? That's the amount of time Harvard Business Review columnist Peter Bregman suggests in his new book that it takes out of a nine-hour workday to create and stick to a plan to get the most out of the rest of your day. To break it down, that's five minutes to plan ahead before you turn on the computer in the morning, one minute of every hour to refocus on the next hour and five minutes at the end of the day to review your progress. Notice that none of those minutes are dedicated to Facebook.
5 questions for Eddie Brown
Eddie Brown, founder of Brown Capital Management in Baltimore, went to work at age 12 as a moonshine runner in Central Florida, driving his uncle's souped-up Ford pickup. Brown, 70, recounts his life and investing strategies in a new book, Beating the Odds. He did that with help from an anonymous benefactor who paid his college fees. That act of kindness set the compass of his life, pointing him toward a career in wealth building and charitable giving.
Q: In 1973, you were the first African-American money manager at T. Rowe Price. Did you see yourself as a trailblazer?
A: Not really. I was seeking an opportunity as a portfolio manager with a firm whose founder created the growth-stock style of investing. They saw talent and hired me. I give T. Rowe Price a lot of credit, because there were no outside forces making them do it.
Q: What was it like working with other portfolio managers? Collegial or competitive?
A: Competitive but not dog-eat-dog. I had only one non-collegial experience. The team that I was hired to be part of consisted of three money managers. When the other two left, a manager tried to take advantage. I had some pretty large client relationships, and he tried to grab one of those relationships.
Q: You were a rotating panelist onWall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser. How much did that elevate your stature in the industry?
A: Huge. It was the most-watched financial program on television. Being selected gave me a certain halo. It gave me credibility in the industry, because only a limited number of people were selected to be rotating panelists.
Q: Brown Capital has $4 billion in assets under management. How much did your first client invest, and what's been your investing style?
A: $200,000 from a lady who had watched me on Wall $treet Week. I had a minimum investment at the time of $100,000. My style is called GARP, for growth at a reasonable price. It's about paying less and getting more. When I started Brown Capital in 1983, the term didn't exist. There were two styles: growth and value.
Q: Why is charity important to you?
A: In my book, I write about Lady B, a white woman I never met who provided $1,000 for every year I was at Howard University. She told a community leader where I lived she wanted to help a black go to college. She was my inspiration. So in 1996, my wife and I set up the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Family Foundation, to make a difference for families in need.
Check it out
Bloomberg Markets: New regulations coming out of Washington and Basel, Switzerland, are digging into profits at Goldman Sachs. The 2010 Dodd-Frank act and new rules formulated by the Bank for International Settlements are threatening the Wall Street giant's growth, writes John J. Curran in Bloomberg Markets magazine. The bank has already closed two proprietary trading desks and is preparing to revamp its over-the-counter derivative business. But Curran says executives are confident that smart use of technology, and investment in Brazil, Russia, India and China will keep the firm on top.
Foreign Affairs: Scholars call it the oil curse, arguing that oil wealth leads to authoritarianism, economic instability, corruption and violent conflict. In Foreign Affairs magazine, the concept is used to help explain the Arab Spring. UCLA professor Michael L. Ross notes that the oil-rich regimes were more effective at fending off attempts to unseat them. The Arab Spring has seriously threatened just one oil-funded ruler — Libya's Moammar Gadhafi — and only because NATO's intervention prevented the rebels' certain defeat.
The International Economy: Do natural disasters have a stimulative or a contractionary effect on an economy? Seventeen prominent thinkers were asked by The International Economy magazine to ponder the economic impact of events such as the earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, the triple disaster in Japan and the recent flooding, tornadoes and wildfires in the American heartland. Some believe reconstruction offers an opportunity; others question whether new projects are enough to dispel "a dark cloud of gloom."
Harvard Business Review: EBay founder Pierre Omidyar tells Harvard Business Review how he adapted the eBay business model to philanthropy. He was inspired by eBay's social impact to create a hybrid model for his philanthropic Omidyar Network: non-profit program officers and for-profit venture capitalists focusing on microfinance to bring about sustainable change.