Here at Dent HQ, our favorite relatable machine is by far Brent Spiner's legendary android Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. With a positronic brain and thousands of minute servos in his face and neck, Mr. Data mimicked human thought, facial expressions, and body language.

Not long ago, Square CEO Jack Dorsey challenged his team to create a solution for accepting payments at Starbucks, which the mobile-payments company had partnered with in August.

In the lead up to today’s release of the Steve Jobs biography, there’s been an increasing stream of news surrounding its subject. As a business researcher, I was particularly interested in this recent article that referenced from his biography a list of Jobs’s favorite books.

I just read a fascinating article dug up by Mike Cane from a 1922 copy of The American Magazine, titled "Why I Quit Being So Accommodating."

As an accommodating person myself, I was immediately intrigued.

Just ran across this piece by Tyler Brûlé in FT. In "Kylie, me and client focus," Brûlé punctuates what I've been saying to people lately about J Crew CEO (and Sun Valley denizen) Mickey Drexler -- that he'd make a great dean of a business school.

Nothing worthwhile is effortless. The leaders whose work and accomplishments we admire work every day on what Dustin Curtis calls “The Fight”:

But the truth is that, in order to make progress, you need to physically and mentally fight against the momentum of ordinary events.

If anyone doubted the continued importance of design at a post-Jobs Apple, those doubts were put to rest yesterday when Apple announced a few major changes in executive leadership, including Jony Ive’s move to Human Interface leadership across the entire company.

Tony Fadell made headlines last year with the release of Nest, the consumer-friendly, AI-infused, beautiful thermostat. That this thermostat is all of these things should be no surprise if you look at Tony’s background - as the inventor of the iPod, and an executive at Apple who helped shepherd the iPhone

I recently ran across an old post from Bijan Sabet, referencing an even older interview with Jeff Bezos, who outlines a “framework” for his decision to leave a cushy Wall Street job and start Amazon.com.

In the interview, Bezos calls this a “regret minimization framework.” It’s a brilliant use of perspective to help make correct decisions: