From Paul Grahama's "Hackers and Painters" comes a wonderfully insightful essay about contribution and reward. In describing a startup as a place where individuals can be rewarded for their contribution, he identifies the biggest impediment to smart and/or ambitious people in bigger companies: that their contribution is averaged out with all the other dumb or unambitious folks.

According to Graham: to get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

One more commentator dancing around Otto Von Bismark's famous aphorism.

Poltics is stlll just the art of the possible, but the 'possible' has changed a bit in a world of Entertainment Tonight and Larry King Live

Clay Shirky on people power and "cognitive surplus"