Archive: October 6, 2009

<<< October 5, 2009

Home

October 10, 2009 >>>


BMW watches

Tuesday,  10/06/09  10:35 PM

The other day I received the latest issue - a beautiful nice glossy one - of BMW Magazine.

Well of course it is a thinly disguised sales brochure for BMW cars.  But what I found interesting is the other advertising; luxury products targeted at the obviously wealthy demographic of BMW owners.  Some of the coolest watches and jewelry I've ever seen, from manufacturers I've never heard of (yes, the magazine is German, and so are the majority of the advertisers). 

Herewith, a sample...

 

not so fast

Tuesday,  10/06/09  10:53 PM

The New Yorker has a fascinating story by Jill Lepore: Not So Fast.  "Scientific management started as a way to work.  How did it become a way of life?"

Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.”

I think the larger question answers the smaller one: "How did work become a way of life?"

 
 

Return to the archive.