At the 2008 Davos billionaire’s prom, Bill Gates gave a speech calling for “creative capitalism.” His message was roughly that corporations are good at solving problems, and the world has enormous problems. If companies would apply some of their researchers, expertise, and money to these problems they might be able to do things that have escaped governments and NGO’s.

If it were anyone but Gates, arguably the world’s best business strategist, this would have been only mildly interesting and a slightly mushy idea. And maybe it would have faded away but Michael Kinsey, founder of Slate among other publications, decided that there was a book here. Rather than write it, or assemble a collection of essays by invitation only, he set up a blog and publicized it among economists. The result was an ongoing conversation among people like Ed Glaeser, Robert Reich, Larry Summers, and lots of people I’ve never heard of but I’ll bet most economists have.

The resulting dialogue was all published as a book (Creative Capitalism) last December that I picked up and read last weekend (some of it anyway). It’s not a fully formed argument and doesn’t reach any conclusions but it’s a great argument and seems appropriate to this blog. You don’t have to buy the book, the blog is live again.

Microsoft’s new TV ad launched Saturday night during the NFL opener. Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the ad agency behind the $300 million campaign, has garnered much press about the odd partnership.

Many think the ad was a flop, but there sure has been a lot of buzz about the partnership, the campaign, and Jerry Seinfeld’s $10 million celebrity endorsement. Is Microsoft successfully changing its stale image compared to its creative rival, Apple? What do you think of the teaser ad?

Ask Rana for Advice on Work, Life, and Play

Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson. According to this story in Forbes, 73 of the world’s 1,125 billionaires dropped out of school along the way. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reports on research that says preschool is counterproductive – keep the kids home with mom and dad longer. Finland, where kids start school at seven, is seen as a model of education. Peter Drucker famously said that the resarch university would not survive the shift to knowledge-based capitalism.

So, do we need less school, or different kinds of school, or what?