My friend Sebastian organizes Lectures on Strategy, strategy talks to entrepreneurs and other strategists in Beijing, and invited me to speak to his group. If you’re in Beijing, see me speak April 22 at 4pm, near the Shuangjing subway stop. RSVP to me or Sebastian (sebastian at sebastianmarshall.com) for details. I’m basing it on my talk at Columbia Business School last month, using mostly the same slides. He plans to[…] Keep reading →

You can’t visit the Great Wall of China without posting pictures from it! We went to the most crowded place and man, was it crowded. But it was amazing. Here are a few pictures to show the wall, the crowd, and my smiling face there.

I don’t like to travel. I didn’t say I don’t get value from traveling. I didn’t say you shouldn’t like traveling. I didn’t say I don’t travel. In fact, I travel a lot. I’ve visited 21 countries last I checked, a high number for Americans, I think. I rode a bike with a friend 1,500 miles from Philadelphia to Bar Harbor, Maine and back the summer between high school and[…] Keep reading →

I just found this video one of my group-mates took that illustrates one of North Korea’s benign oddities — they make amazing scale models of things. Their museums are full of them. This video shows a model train. I’m not sure the value of showing these models. What do they convey besides model-making skills? I don’t quite get it. You also hear at the beginning one of our funniest running[…] Keep reading →

Here’s the first of two podcasts of four of my travel-mates made on our August 2011 visit to North Korea. The original is here. Jordan, who produced the podcast, runs a dating school, which is why you’ll hear ads for it in the podcast. Neil runs a dating school too, among other things. Gabriel is a writer, among other things. Joseph took the most amazing pictures of North Korea I’ve[…] Keep reading →

My interactions with North Korea have taught me more about myself and my values than anything else in recent memory. I was going to say it taught me more about being an American, but being an American means something different to me today than it used to, and means something different to everyone. I’m thinking about America in the context of North Korea today because I’m in the middle of[…] Keep reading →

Saturday’s talk on North Korea at Columbia Business School went great — a full room, an attentive audience, and great questions at the end. I didn’t leave as much time for questions as I wish I had, but the organizer told me people told her they liked the talk a lot. Several people asked for copies of the slides so I’m posting them here instead of sending multiple emails.