Sublime

Peter Singer, Australian moral philosopher

The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles redu

One couple chose what they considered to be the most important domains in marriage—for them, these included money, children, career, religion, friends, and sex—and each wrote down one value for each domain.

PHIL KNIGHT Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus, Nike Inc.

In his great work The Characters, Theophrastus sketched thirty types—from the penurious and the garrulous to the flatterer and the shamelessly greedy—and illustrated his character portraits with an astonishing level of detail.