In certain professions, there's a standard set of ambitions. Every TV star wants to be in movies. Every teeny-bopper starlet wants to record an album. And among business-book authors, there's a universal desire to write a crossover hit, a tome that appeals to folks who prefer Us Weekly to The Wall Street Journal and couldn't tell a widget from a wedgie. And in early 2001, Jim Collins hoped for that kind of breakthrough. Collins was already a superstar among the M.B.A. set thanks to "Built to Last," the 1994 book he'd coauthored that had spent years on best-seller lists. But in 2001 he was due to release his next book, "Good to Great." He knew it'd get plenty of attention from business junkies. But what he really hoped for, he told NEWSWEEK before the title hit bookstores, was that it'd be read by school principals and church pastors. After years of helping businesses boost profits, Collins hoped to teach America's do-gooders to do even better.He's getting his wish. "Good to Great"...

As marketing executives, D. A. Hayden and Michael Wilder routinely interviewed new college graduates--and they often came away appalled. "I wanted to tell them, 'If you'd only done this [differently], I would have invited you back'," Hayden says. Now she can give that blunt feedback--and charge for it. In September, she cofounded a Boston-based firm, Hayden-Wilder, which offers customized packages of one-on-one counseling, homework assignments, videotaped interview critiques and networking referrals. The average charge: $3,000. Clients like Caroline Dabney, a 2005 graduate of Hamilton College, say it's worth it. "They gave me a lot more confidence," says Dabney.Career coaches have been around for decades, but most focus on middle-aged folks who've been downsized or are changing careers. College students traditionally have relied on free counseling at campus career centers. But now a generation of affluent kids whose parents paid for SAT prep courses and pricey college-search...

It's the start of the movie-awards season--not just in Hollywood, but over the hill in the San Fernando Valley, home to the pornography industry. This week Adult Video News will announce nominees for its annual show, held in Las Vegas each January. And one film seems poised to pile up honors the way "The Aviator" dominated this year's Oscars. "Pirates," released in September, is already being hailed as a blue movie for the ages.Filmed in California and Florida at a cost of more than $1 million (its producer calls it the most expensive porno in history), it features lavish special effects, epic sea battles and skillful swordplay. The director of "Pirates," who uses the name Joone, says he decided to splurge for a high-quality film that would stand out from the low-budget clutter. So far it's paid off: he says it's already sold more than 100,000 copies. (Many pornos sell just 5,000.) "This is a landmark achievement in our business," says Paul Fishbein, Adult Video News president. "The...

When I need a rental car for a business trip, I give NEWSWEEK's travel agent a simple directive: "Whatever's cheapest." I'm not enough of a road warrior to be loyal to a particular rental brand, and I don't care whether they stick me in a Malibu or a Taurus. Which is why, a few months ago, I wound up in a line at a car-rental counter at the Phoenix airport, waiting... and then waiting some more. As the line barely crawled forward and any hope of making my lunch appointment dimmed, the clerks at the counter made periodic announcements that made my slow march even more irritating: "Anyone who's a member of our preferred club , please come right to the head of the line." It was an infuriating reminder that when it comes to car rentals, membership has its privileges.But it does come at a price. Unlike frequent-flier programs, which are usually free, some rental-car programs like Hertz #1 Gold and National's Emerald Club typically charge a $50 annual fee. Marketing pros call these "paid...

In a back alley in London's SoHo district--amid the seedy sex shops, comic-book stores and coffee joints--you'll find the humble headquarters of one of the world's most important telecommunications companies. But it's not easy: only a tiny buzzer marks the door of a converted warehouse. The decor inside--IKEA furniture, a couple of limp potted plants, bike helmets strewn about the reception area--is the same as it was a year ago, when the company was still an obscure start-up. But the small workspace is more crowded nowadays, jammed with several dozen fleece-clad techies hunched over laptops. Together, they're expanding the reach of the online telephone service known as Skype--a prospect that has the $1 trillion global telecom industry downright terrified.Skype set up shop only three years ago. And since then, 61 million users in 225 countries have downloaded its free software, donned headsets and made free computer-to-computer phone calls. But its ascension onto the high-tech A...

Andrew Grossman was in his office at Wal-Mart Watch, opening the mail one day in September, when he came across a plain manila envelope with no return address. Inside he found a memo labeled "Memorandum to the Board of Directors From Susan Chambers." Hmmm. Grossman, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who's now an anti-Wal-Mart activist, Googled the name to learn that Chambers is the retailer's executive vice president for benefits. The draft memo described how 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart workers are uninsured or on Medicaid. It detailed how Wal-Mart's health plan requires such high out-of-pocket payments that the small number of employees hit by a very costly illness "almost certainly end up declaring personal bankruptcy." It also proposed that Wal-Mart rewrite job descriptions to involve more physical activity, in part to "dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart." "I was kind of shocked by it," Grossman says....

Leslie Varon's boss lived by a simple rule: if he was in the office, she should be, too. In the early 1990s Varon worked in finance at Xerox, and the department's VP was an old-style organization man. "You could set your watch by the hours this man worked," Varon says, recalling 12-hour days that often began at 7 a.m. For Varon and her colleagues, that meant missing family dinners. After much discontent, they called a meeting. Couldn't they take work home in order to get out in time for supper? The boss agreed, slowly growing to believe that an employee's value lies in her work, not the hours spent at her desk. As for Varon, her earlier departures don't seem to have impeded her career: today she's Xerox's finance VP.Her status as a female officer would make her a rarity at many companies, but not at Xerox. The $15.7 billion document-management company is one of only nine in the Fortune 500 with a female CEO, but its gender diversity extends far beyond the corner office. Of Xerox's...

Leslie Varon's boss lived by a simple rule: if he was in the office, she should be, too. In the early 1990s Varon worked in finance at Xerox, and the department's VP was an old-style organization man. "You could set your watch by the hours this man worked," Varon says, recalling 12-hour days that often began at 7 a.m. For Varon and her colleagues, that meant missing family dinners. After much discontent, they called a meeting. Couldn't they take work home in order to get out in time for supper? The boss agreed, slowly growing to believe that an employee's value lies in her work, not the hours spent at her desk. As for Varon, her earlier departures don't seem to have impeded her career: today she's Xerox's finance VP.Her status as a female officer would make her a rarity at many companies, but not at Xerox. The $15.7 billion document-management company is one of only nine in the Fortune 500 with a female CEO, but its gender diversity extends far beyond the corner office. Of Xerox's...

As a young sociology professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter studied life in 19th-century utopian communities. By the late 1970s, however, her focus had shifted to a less idealized environment: the modern American corporation. Since then Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, has authored 16 books; the latest is "Confidence: How Winning and Losing Streaks Begin and End." She spoke with NEWSWEEK's Daniel McGinn about how confidence affects women's careers. Excerpts: ...

Given his fondness for movies, it's not surprising that Reed Hastings thinks about the future of home entertainment in terms that sound like they're drawn straight from "Star Wars." The story line, according to the founder of the DVDs-by-mail pioneer Netflix, goes something like this: as DVDs slowly give way to online movies, consumers will face a stark choice. Will they side with the "Forces of Control" or the "Forces of Freedom"? The Forces of Control are the cable and satellite companies, which offer 50 to 500 channels of content that's chosen by network programmers.Opposing this bunch are the Forces of Freedom, a group of companies that includes Netflix, TiVo, Apple, AOL and Yahoo. Together the freedom fighters will offer something like 5 million channels via the Internet, giving consumers the ability to watch just about anything they'd like, whenever they'd like. "Instead of an electronic program guide that viewers scroll through with a remote control, the keyboard will be your...

Dvd's have changed the way we watch movies, but they're not perfect. To watch one, you have to plan ahead, drive to a store to pick up a copy or go online (and wait for the mail carrier). That will change, says Sony Pictures Digital president Yair Landau, as cinephiles begin downloading movies over broadband Internet connections, just as music lovers now download MP3s. He told NEWSWEEK's Daniel McGinn how the advent of online movies will change the film industry. ...

DVDs have changed the way we watch movies, but they're not perfect. To watch one, you have to plan ahead, drive to a store to pick up a copy or go online (and wait for the mail carrier) to rent it from Netflix. That will change, says Sony Pictures Digital president Yair Landau, as cinephiles begin downloading movies over broadband Internet connections, just as music lovers now download MP3s. He told NEWSWEEK's Daniel McGinn how the advent of online movies will change the film industry.MCGINN: Is there currently a legal way for people to download movies?LANDAU: We started a legal download-movie service called Movielink several years ago. It's got five studios as partners, but right now it's strictly a rental service. Prices range from $1.99 to $4.99, and you can watch the movie for 24 hours on your PC. We've had limited success thus far. On a consumer-experience basis, it's not as easy or compelling as getting a DVD mailed to you. Right now, my hat's off to Netflix for recognizing...

Neil Balter's closet was a mess. A 17-year-old college student, Balter was sharing an apartment in Los Angeles with two friends back in 1978. To help his tiny closet better accommodate his stuff, he bought sheets of particleboard and replaced the standard single-bar-under-a-shelf setup with a customized stack of shelves, adorned with hanging bars at different levels. Then a friend's parents hired Balter to redo their closet. And then he did another. Before long the teenager had founded California Closets, the pioneer in the better-living-through-neater-closets company.A quarter century and countless cubbies later, the concept has caught on--big time. From cramped urban apartments to sprawling suburban manses, Americans are hiring professionals to fill their closets with laminate shelves, drawers, wicker baskets, nooks and other storage accoutrements worthy of Imelda Marcos. Though estimates vary, custom closets are at least a $1.5 billion industry. Add in do-it-yourself products and...

Given his fondness for movies, it's not surprising that Reed Hastings thinks about the future of home entertainment in terms that sound like they're drawn straight from "Star Wars." The story line, according to the founder of the DVDs-by-mail pioneer Netflix, goes something like this: as DVDs slowly give way to online movies, consumers will face a stark choice. Will they side with the "Forces of Control" or the "Forces of Freedom"? The Forces of Control are the cable and satellite companies, which offer 50 to 500 channels of content that's chosen by network programmers.Opposing this bunch are the Forces of Freedom, a group of companies that includes Netflix, TiVo, Apple, AOL and Yahoo. Together the freedom fighters will offer something like 5 million channels via the Internet, giving consumers the ability to watch just about anything they'd like, whenever they'd like. "Instead of an electronic program guide that viewers scroll through with a remote control, the keyboard will be your...

It's been a hectic year for America's chief executives. In the first seven months of 2005, 777 CEOs left their jobs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's 90 percent ahead of 2004's pace. To replace them, boards are turning to outsiders with increasing frequency. While inside candidate Robert Iger won the year's highest-profile CEO derby by replacing Michael Eisner at Disney, in the last year directors at Nike, HP and Boeing have each hired outsiders for the top job.While shareholders want boards to pick the best candidate, imported talent inevitably costs more. During the book tour for his recent best seller "Winning," former General Electric chairman Jack Welch has pointed out the irony that when he chose among three GE subordinates to replace him, the two men he passed over (Bob Nardelli, now at Home Depot, and James McNerney, now at Boeing) wound up making better money than Jeff Immelt, GE's current chairman. Welch says if more companies developed future CEOs in...

RAISED IN THE ERA OF JOHN PAUL II, THESE YOUNG PEOPLE ARE RESURRECTING OLD RITUALS AND HEWING TO STRICT DOCTRINE.

For years, anthropologist Rebekah Nathan studied life in a remote Third World village between stints of teaching at a big state university. But after years as a professor, she felt disconnected from her students. Why did so few do the assigned readings? Who told them it was OK to eat in class? To answer these questions, Nathan, who's in her 50s, enrolled as a freshman, moved into a dormitory and used her anthropology skills to study the tribal rituals of undergrads.The result is "My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student." Published under a pseudonym and without revealing where she teaches, the book is no "Animal House": due to her age, the prof avoided frat parties and instead focused on students' academic lives. The main lesson: time-management skills are key. She saw how profs' office hours often conflicted with her other classes. Deciding which reading assignments to skip was a necessary survival tactic. "I didn't really remember what it took to do this,"...

Each year, when the freshmen arrive at Boston College, the rumors spread around the cafeterias: cooks spray starch on the salad to make you fat, add laxatives to make you eat more and--gross!--use grade-D meat (there is, in fact, no such thing). When this buzz reached dining-services director Helen Wechsler last year, she thought the students were kidding. They weren't. To combat the problem, she designed myth-busting cards that will be placed on cafeteria tables this fall. (All meat is grade U.S. Choice or better, one clarifies.)Similar rumors make the rounds at other colleges. "The salad bar seems to be the place where we add the mystery sprays," says Matthew Biette, dining chief at Middlebury College, where rumors have spread about protein or diuretic sprays. Students' paranoia about doctored food is one reason college dining halls now feature open kitchens. That way, "there's not as much mystery in the way foods are prepared," says National Association of College &...

Until a few years ago, Judy Peterson, a special-education teacher who lives near Sacramento, Calif., had never heard of Pocatello, Idaho. Nor did Peterson, 59, ever expect to own any real estate aside from her own home. But last year, tired of earning mediocre stock-market returns, she cashed in her retirement accounts and spent $120,000 on a three-family house in Pocatello. Then she bought another property. And another. Today, Peterson owns eight rental units in the city, which she's visited just twice. "I have friends who go, 'You did what?' " she says. But with rental income paying the properties' mortgages, she's pleased. "You can't find investments like this in California," she says.You've heard about the current real-estate boom. You've read about investors who are "flipping" properties in hot markets like Las Vegas or Miami. Maybe you've even participated in a dinner-party discussion of what's becoming America's most tiresome question: will the housing bubble burst or not?...

What if most of your income arrived in a single paycheck around Thanksgiving, and you had to make ends meet for the rest of the year? That's an extreme example of "seasonality." Few firms face that challenge more than American Christmas Decorations, a $6.3 million company in the Bronx, N.Y., that designs and installs trees, wreaths and other holiday displays in offices and retail stores. "The most common question I'm asked is, 'What do you do the rest of the year?'" says CEO Fred Schwam, who took over the company from his father in 1988.In fact, signing up accounts and designing projects for existing customers like Radio City Music Hall and Saks keep Schwam's 20 employees busy year-round--even now during summer. Because so much of the installation work happens from late October to early December, Schwam hires up to 90 temporary workers; to smooth out the revenue stream, he typically collects a 50 percent down payment when a client signs on. Still, "everybody told me I couldn't just...

As first dates go, this one couldn't have been more awkward. Last month John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster, flew to Manhattan to dine with Carl Icahn, the billionaire and former corporate raider. For weeks Icahn, who owns 9 percent of Blockbuster's shares, had publicly railed against Antioco's plans to invest millions to get the lagging movie-rental company growing again. Instead of trying to rejuvenate Blockbuster, Icahn argued, Antioco should just milk the mature business for cash. The two men's clash over the future of the company had recently culminated in a dramatic proxy fight, in which Icahn's side won three seats on Blockbuster's eight-member board. But at the dinner a few nights later, as both men recounted to NEWSWEEK, they called a truce. "I hope we're going to have a good working relationship," Icahn told Antioco, who replied, "Carl, for better or worse, we're in this together."If that sounds like something less than the start of a beautiful friendship, it's a...

There was a time when a business leader was someone straight from Central Casting. They were the suit-clad CEOs of the old-style blue chips--GM, Sony, Siemens--at the pinnacle of global business. Their records were judged by size--of profits, revenue, workforce. But times change, so in this installment of NEWSWEEK's series on 21st-Century Leadership, we're highlighting new thinkers whose influence is measured by the leading commodity in a knowledge economy: ideas. You'll meet the self-consciously provocative woman who is fighting to bring American publishing into the new-media age, a pioneer who has created a unique soup-to-nuts Internet conglomerate in Japan and the first entrepreneur from a small Latin American nation with the chutzpah to go global.If you suspect their jobs are more fun than those of traditional big-company bosses, you're probably correct. This has been a tough year for established leaders, especially recently dethroned CEOs like HP's Carly Fiorina or Carrefour's...

Nothing inspires envy like real estate. That's been true for generations, but perhaps never more so than today, as home prices are on a tear in cities across the country. Author Steven Gaines first wrote about rich people jousting for trophy properties in the Hamptons, on New York's Long Island, in the 1998 best seller "Philistines at the Hedgerow." Now he's turned a critical eye on the world of high-end New York City apartments in "The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan." The book profiles the city's most powerful real-estate agents and takes readers inside the secretive co-op boards that control access to the city's most prestigious buildings--groups who routinely deny attempts from celebrities like Madonna or Mariah Carey to buy apartments. Gaines spoke with NEWSWEEK's Daniel McGinn. Excerpts:Steven Gaines: When I was little, my father was a schoolteacher in Brooklyn, where the starting salary was $12,000 or $13,000 a year. We lived above my grandmother's clothing...

There was a time when a business leader was someone straight from Central Casting. They were the suit-clad CEOs of the alphabet-soup companies--GM, GE, IBM, AT&T--at the pinnacle of American business. Times change. The men and (occasionally, at least) women who now lead the biggest U.S. corporations still matter, and size still matters as well: business will always be a game in which the score is kept in dollars.But ideas matter, too. So in this installment of NEWSWEEK's series on 21st-Century Leadership, we're highlighting men and women whose influence isn't measured by old-fashioned indicators like the number of employees they manage or the board seats they hold. Instead, these New Thinkers are leading industries in whole new directions. In the profiles that follow you'll meet an executive who's convincing customers who love $4 cups of Starbucks coffee that they should also turn to the chain to buy music. Another is proving that nowadays some of the best advertisements won't...

Forget blogs. For desk jockeys, the Web offers a better genre of goof-off sites: online real-estate listings. But while most of these sites offer the same tired set of photos--look: another crummy shot of the living room!--one site's upping the ante in an increasingly competitive industry. Over the last 18 months, Foxtons, a New Jersey-based discount real-estate firm, has hired 21 professional photographers who shoot homes for its Web site with pro-style digital cameras, high-quality flashes and wide-angle lenses. While Realtor.com, the biggest real-estate Web site, offers a maximum of six photos of each listing (most shot by brokers themselves), some of Foxtons's include two dozen shots, such as artsy close-ups of stairways, windows or fireplaces. "We try to give a bit more of the character of the home," says Sean Begley, Foxtons's head of photography, who spends $150 to $200 per shoot.One downside: potential disappointment. Some shoppers complain the photographers do too well, and...

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve is all but certain to boost short-term interest rates to 3 percent, its eighth hike in a year. But for some market-watchers, the deeper insight into the Fed's thinking won't come from the brief rate announcement, but three weeks later when the Fed releases the minutes of its deliberations.Until January, the Fed kept these notes under wraps for six weeks, until after its next meeting. But this year it's released them more quickly--its latest move toward "transparency," a key element in the legacy of chairman Alan Greenspan, who'll retire next January. But is this too much of a good thing? The Dow's reacted sharply to the minutes' release in recent months as investors have struggled to interpret the Fed's musings. "[The Fed's] gotten into the business of giving some sense of where their next move [will] be, and there's some question over whether that's useful or not," says Allan H. Meltzer, a Fed historian. With inflation rising and economic growth...

For students admitted to several colleges, the clock is ticking: most schools require a deposit by May 1. Choosing can be tough enough--and these decisions are becoming trickier as schools offer more merit scholarships in hopes of luring brighter students to campus, which helps in rankings. Many of these scholarships go to students from affluent families, fueling a hot debate: should scarce dollars be used to fight over rich kids, instead of giving more low-income kids access to college?For the families themselves, that question is less pressing than deciding if their child should, say, accept a full ride from University A or pay to attend College B. Amid growing pressure to find the "perfect" school, some pros speculate that the scholarships are holding less sway, with more affluent families willing to dig deep for their student's ideal college. But there's growing evidence that kids can excel at a wide range of schools, so Washington, D.C., adviser Steve Goodman says turning down...

When it comes to succession planning, corporate boards usually prepare for disaster by putting together what they call "the envelope," which contains instructions on who takes over if the chief executive is suddenly incapacitated. Rarely, however, do companies need to pull out these envelopes as frequently as McDonald's recently has. One year ago this week, McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo, 60, died of a heart attack, and the board quickly named his deputy, Charlie Bell, to succeed him. Just weeks later, however, Bell was diagnosed with colon cancer. He stayed in the job until November, but by January, Bell, 44, had died, too.The back-to-back deaths are making corporate boards pay closer attention to the health of the men and women they're considering for top jobs. The goal: to hire healthier CEOs so the envelope never needs to be opened. Recruiter Stephen Mader of Christian & Timbers says many senior executives are already required to have an annual physical. But in reaction to the...

If you fly into the Las Vegas airport, grab a cab and ask the driver to take you to the town's most fabulous casino, you might arrive at the door of Mandalay Bay, which has a giant shark aquarium, the best pool and classy restaurants like Aureole. Or maybe you'll wind up throwing dice at the Palms, where Paris Hilton and Britney Spears party regularly. But the odds are surely slim that you'll find yourself at Harrah's, a slender and unimaginative casino-hotel, whose 2,530 rooms haven't changed much since its days in the 1970s as a Holiday Inn. Harrah's is strictly a midmarket gambling parlor, more apt to lure in gamblers who lose perhaps $200 an evening than the high rollers who bet thousands per hand. Yet where casino aficionados see an appalling lack of style, Wall Street sees a lot to love. For, despite its lack of trimming and trappings, Harrah's management team has turned the company into a profit machine.Credit for that goes to Gary Loveman, an MIT-trained economist who's...

The Chairman: A Novel by Stephen FreyAs the new chairman of a major private-equity group, Christian Gillette must not only oversee 27 companies and raise $15 billion for a new fund, but has to figure out who murdered his former boss and attempted to kill him at the funeral--before they try again. And you thought Enron was complicated! The mystery unravels slowly over 320 pages, and there are many twists and turns along the way. But Frey's writing is so vivid and the action so fast-paced, you'll want to stick around for the ride. Some scenes--an explosion, a car chase, even an executive dangling from a 42nd-floor balcony--seem straight out of a Jerry Bruckheimer film. But if the story remained as riveting on screen as on paper, it could be a blockbuster. Stay tuned.All Your Worth by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren TyagiIn their last book, "The Two-Income Trap," the mother-and-daughter team recommended social solutions to ease the financial burden on today's middle-class working...