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My colleague and friend, Hak, made an observation about types of firms based on whose hand is on the tiller. Sometimes I am reminded of the classic game The Secret of Monkey Island. Stan is a sales guy and it doesn’t much matter what he’s selling. There are basically two types; there are others, but they’re in the noise. They describe themselves when they describe their company philosophy. One type says they are “customer driven....

The Japan of the Heian period, 794-1185, unsurprisingly was different from popular images of medieval Japan. In writing the Yamabuki series, as much as I could, I looked to experts in the field who understood what the Heian period was, and also what it was not. If the informed Westerner was asked to enumerate the outstanding features of traditional Japan, his list might well consist of the following: in culture No and Kabuki drama, Haiku poems, Ukiyoe colour prints, samisen music, and various activities like the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and the preparation of miniature landscapes that are related to Zen influences; in society the two-sworded samurai and the geisha; in ideas the Zen approach to human experience with its stress on an intuitive understanding of the truth and sudden enlightenment, the samurai ethic sometimes known as Bushido, a great concern with the the conflicting demands of duty and human affection and an extremely permissive attitude to suicide, especially love suicides; in domestic architecture fitted straw matting (tatami), large communal baths, tokonoma alcoves for hanging kakemono; in food raw fish and soy (tempura and sukiyaki being judiciously excluded as Western importations)....

This photograph was taken over a century ago. The young woman is wearing samurai gear. Thus, it was not just during the Gempei War that women saw themselves as warriors.

Woman warrior during the Gempei Wars. Several women fought in the Gempei Wars, 1180-1185, for control of Japan.

Is Drupal a Disruptive Technology? What if Harvard College takes on Notre Dame in football. Of course we can beat them; after all, they’re only men. —Professor Harry H. Hansen, Harvard Business School, on understanding the limits of the possible. There is a lot of talk, some would say hype, about Drupal being enterprise-ready. Certainly Drupal is no piker system. From a relatively unknown Content Management System (CMS), Drupal has burst on the scene and now accounts for one-percent of all websites, which to some might seems small until we stop to think how big the web is....