Work Stories

As terrorists seized control of four airplanes on Sept. 11th, 2001, Ben Sliney, chief of air-traffic-control operations at the FAA’s command center in Herndon, Va., gave...

This lodging should be called Scare-bnb. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has opened up about the weirdest complaint a user has ever made, and it involves a debatably friendly...

Some business stories I hear are worth telling  and this is one of them. About a year ago I had the opportunity to work with a...

“This is the captain speaking, brace for impact.” This is how Chesley B. Sullenberger (“Sully”) addressed his 150 passengers before doing the maneuver known as the “miracle on the...

After having a faulty Medtronic catheter thrown at him by an angry surgeon, then CEO Bill George began investigating why he hadn’t known about quality problems...

On January 30, 2002, The United States Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a report entitled NASA: Better Mechanisms for Sharing Lessons Learned. Motivated by the costly...

A toothpaste factory had a problem: Due to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. People...

Dell discovered that it could lower the cost of production by asking ASUSTek to make simple circuit boards inside a Dell computer. As a public corporation,...

In The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen reproduce a story (‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table’) told by Jon Stegner, most probably the CEO...

When Nooyi first became CEO of the now $150 billion company back in 2006, she visited India, where she had grown up, to see her mother. “When I got...