Every small business has a story waiting to be told—and that story can be your most powerful ally in demonstrating how your business is different from all others. One term I have often used to describe this is in terms of the backstory of an organization.

A backstory is the history behind an organization and how it became what it is today. It is not a timeline of accomplishments or the boilerplate history that can often be found on company websites. The backstory is something more meaningful. It has real characters and a believable tale of how these characters had to evolve and overcome challenges in order to make their business successful.

In order to create a powerful backstory, you generally need to have five key story elements.

Companies can craft strategies to effectively combat counterfeiting by using new technology, old-fashioned detective work, and a little psychology. The solution is to target both sellers and buyers of counterfeit goods with a strategy that mixes offensive and defensive measures: defend, detect, doubt, and discourage.

The annual review from strategy+business: Clive Crook on The Meltdown, Charles Handy on Leadership, Phil Rosenzweig on Strategy, Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna on Globalization, Judith F. Samuelson on Management, Catharine P. Taylor on Marketing, Steven Levy on Technology, and James O’Toole on Biography.

Here’s a list of ways you can help so-called business gurus see their bullshit. You can help them recognize when they’ve gone too far and have drunk their own Kool-Aid.

Going through school to get an MBA can take a few years away from your life and work. These days you don’t always have time to take a few years and be a student. You’ve got bills to pay! This list of 100 business blogs can bring you up to speed in the briefcase world so you can take a detour around the MBA education route.

Auctions are popular mechanisms for the exchange of goods and services in the marketplace. Common examples of items offered at auctions include real estate, mineral rights, construction contracts, agricultural products, United States Treasury bills, and government procurement contracts. Auctions are now even more commonplace in our personal lives, where online auction sites have made it possible for individuals to bid for and sell items en masse.

Auctions are particularly useful whenever there is uncertainty about the value of an item to be sold and the seller is willing to accept whatever price the market (i.e., the bidders) establishes for the item. Unfortunately, the competition amongst bidders in auctions often results in a phenomenon termed the "winner's curse," an outcome in which the winner prevails by submitting a bid that is not only higher than competing bids, but also higher than the true value of the item. In this article, we discuss how this phenomenon can be modeled via simulation and how the simulation results can be used to develop strategies for hedging bids, creating an optimal balance between the probability of winning and the economic gain from the transaction.

Our relationship with money has many facets. Some people seem addicted to accumulating it, while others can't help maxing out their credit cards and find it impossible to save for a rainy day. As we come to understand more about money's effect on us, it is emerging that some people's brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it is like a friend. Some studies even suggest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And, of course, because having a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is virtually synonymous with status - so much so that losing it can lead to depression and even suicide. In these cash-strapped times, perhaps an insight into the psychology of money can improve the way we deal with it.

May you have the good luck to realize its importance to success.

Of course, failure isn’t an experience to be deliberately sought, and cushioning ourselves against its harshest blows makes perfect sense. But failure isn’t something to be despised or ashamed of, either. That’s not a message we hear a lot about these days. Yet some of history’s most impressive successes started out as big, fat failures. The stories of the world’s most successful failures suggest that what matters most is not whether you win or lose, but how you fail. [Hat Tip to Bruce Lynn]

There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. you can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. or faked. or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. so trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing? From my study of the network economy, I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

The Fall 2003 issue of Rotman magazine contains 68 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
- Brand U: Why Branding Yourself makes Sense
- Knowing vs. Doing: Why Can’t We Get Anything Done? by Jeffrey Pfeffer
- The Race for Effectiveness: Is it Effective? by Hilary Austen
- Working With Emotional Intelligence by Stéphane Côté
- Making Your Mind Effective by Mihnea Moldoveanu
- Working with Emotional Intelligence by Prof. Stéphane Côté
- In Search of Power Equilibrium by Prof. Jennifer Berdahl

The Winter 2005 issue of Rotman magazine contains 100 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
- Validity vs. Reliability: Implications for Management by Roger Martin
- The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise by Gabriella Lojacono and Gianfranco Zaccai
- Promoting Experimentation for Organizational Learning: The Mixed Effects of Inconsistency by Amy Edmondson
- Beyond Products: Designing the Brand Experience by David Dunne
- Questions for Malcolm Gladwell: Life after The Tipping Point
- Virtual Progress: How Perception Affects Choice by Dilip Soman and Mengze Shi

The Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Rotman magazine contains 116 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
- Designing in HOSTILE Territory by Roger Martin
- Interview with a Creativity Guru: Richard Florida
- The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley
- The importance of Forgetting, Borrowing and Learning for strategic experiments by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
- The Creative Mind Myths and Mechanisms: An Interview with Margaret Boden by Karen Christensen
- Learning from Failure: Why it may be your best chance for success by Joel Baum
- Beyond Portfolio Theory: The Next Frontier by Keith Ambachtsheer

This article by an anonymous writer using the byline "Uncle Saul" lists the vast number business books failings, specifically from the point of view of entrepreneurs.

Editor's Note: Entrepreneur or not, this is an interesting, and sadly true, read.

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Here, Edge reprints a New York Times op-ed piece about the 9/11 Commission written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb along with more of his thoughts on related topics.

Editor's Note: the op-ed piece is quite interesting but may strike some as not entirely relevant to the business world; if you feel that way, I recommend you do continue reading the discussion material which follows it as it will become more relevant...

Gallup’s World Poll reveals new findings on the “great global dream” and how it will affect the rise of the next economic empire.

The Spring 2007 issue of Rotman magazine contains 124 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
- Thought Leader Interview: Daniel Kahneman
- Countering the Biggest Risk of All by Adrian Slywotzky and John Drzik
- Bounded Awareness by Dolly Chugh and Max Bazerman
- Hull's Laws: What we can learn from derivatives mishaps by John Hull
- A Primer on the Management of Risk and Uncertainty by David Robinson
- Questions for: David Apgar

Can You Afford Not To? Throughout the world, Muslims are becoming increasingly active as investors and manufacturers, bankers and traders, competitors and suppliers, and becoming real partners in a global economic system. Muslims comprise one of the fastest growing consumer markets in the world and, hence, represent a major growth opportunity for businesses around the world.

New research suggest that the best way to promote fraud detection is to extend the Federal Civic False Claim Act to corporate fraud.

The basis of trust may be changing. It used to be based on reciprocity and as such was fragile and personal. Because of technology, trust is now based on reputation among people who don't know each. It is both less personal and more robust.

PowerPoint recently (and quietly) celebrated its 20th birthday. Why do some people love it while others passionately hate it?

And how can we learn from its strength and its limitations, to be better and more effective communicators?

Marc Andreessen summarizes some research by Dean Simonton on age and creativity across many fields.

Marc Andreessen takes a look at luck and the entrepreneur, focusing on the work of Dr. James Austin, who developed a theory of four kinds of luck (chance).

The Winter 2007 issue of Rotman magazine contains 124 pages of varying quality articles and other information. I personally recommend reading the following:
- Peripheral Vision: An Interview with George Day
- Drivers of Economic Growth by Robert Ayres
- Time for Design by Jeanne Liedtka and Henry Mintzberg
- The Big Picture: Howard Gardner (The Five Minds of the Future)
- Neuroeconomics by Colin Camerer and Drazen Prelec
- Questions for: Alvin Toffler
- The Evolution of Harassment in the Workplace by Jennifer Berdahl
- Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration by Andrew McAfee
- Questions for: Ronald Burt
- The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth by Benjamin Friedman

Seth Godin blogs about whether business books work or are they an utter waste of time.

Editor's Note: the blog post itself is fine, but if the topic interests you will will find quite a number of related trackback posts to further your reading...