Educating in unforgiving times
For those of you who read the print version of BusinessWeek, you know that Jack and Susan Welch write a weekly column on the last page. This week’s article is “Corporate Social Responsibility in a Recession” or his edgier online title “Giving in Unforgiving Times.” It’s a good primer on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which they categorize into three types:
- Donating money, products or services.
- Community involvement
- CSR as a corporate strategy
… with a conclusion that essentially states the obvious: in tough times companies will likely have to cut back their CSR activities, just as they will have to streamline other areas of business.

This post is the second part of a two-part series on thought leadership for computer makers in emerging markets.
Four years ago, Nicholas Negroponte announced the
That same year, Intel’s nemesis AMD launched the
I’ve always thought that the next major technology disruption would come from the developing world. This could partly be just a bias on my part (most of my career has been developing computer businesses in emerging markets). The underlying logic behind this belief is that disruptive innovations are cheaper, easier to use, and bring some type of end user value that doesn’t exist in the current mainstream solution.