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If you are trying to make sense of declining business investment in the U.S., The Atlantic 's Derek Thompson suggests you consider the U.S. economy as really two economies: the home economy and the away economy. And things look relatively good at home. But on the road... Meanwhile, in the Away Economy, there is a world of precarious, scary, and outright depressing news, which is weighing on large corporations that tend to make more than half of their income from customers outside the U.S. GE and Pfizer, for example, are listed in U.S. stock indices. When their prices fall, it looks like a reflection of the U.S. economy. But both companies make more than 50% of their revenue abroad, and Apple makes more than 60% outside the Americas. When the world catches a cold, multinationals sneeze ... even if the typical U.S. household is feeling alright. Today's bad news in the away economy fits mostly, but not entirely, into three buckets: (1) Demand from Europe, which is a continent-wide recession that could turn into a continental depression; (2) Demand from China, which could slow as it re-balances its economy toward household spending and away from government investment; (3) The fall in commodity/energy prices, which is a combination of secular trends, like plentiful natural gas, and a perceived slowdown in energy-intensive economies (namely Europe and China). Read The Other Economic Cliff: Why Business Investment Is Really Nosediving here .

How much of a difference can one product make? If that product is a new iPhone, it can make a significant difference for the U.S. economy, according to J.P. Morgan 's chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli . At Real Time Economics , Sudeep Reddy passes along what Feroli wrote to J.P. Morgan clients about the pending release of the iPhone 5. In short, Reddy writes, sales of the phone "could add between a quarter and half a percentage point to annualized economic growth in the fourth quarter." In a note to clients today (titled “Can one little phone impact GDP?”), Feroli walks through the math: J.P. Morgan’s equity analysts expect Apple to sell about 8 million iPhone 5 units in the final three months of the year. If the phone sells for around $600, with about $200 of it counted as imported components, then $400 per phone would figure into the government’s measure of gross domestic product. (Even though consumers may not pay that much for the phone, because of subsidies from wireless carriers, Feroli explains that phone-selling companies often report the sales based on the price of the standalone product.) The bottom line: The new iPhone sales could boost GDP by $3.2 billion in the fourth quarter, or $12.8 billion at an annual rate. That is an increase of 0.33 percentage point in the annualized rate of GDP growth. It could be even higher, he says. Even a third of a percentage point would limit the downside risk to J.P. Morgan’s fourth-quarter growth projection of 2%. Read IPhone 5 Sales Could Offer Big Boost to GDP here .

If your neck is feeling stiff lately, we suggest you stop following the path of Apple stock. The price of one share hit a new record high of $605.96 last week, and according to The Economist , Apple stock is now strong enough to have a lifting effect on the markets overall. Take a look at the impact on the S&P 500: The question now seems to be how high it can climb before buyers get truly nervous. As The Economist points out, the announcement last week that Apple will use some of its cash holdings to pay a dividend and buy back some stock, only keeps investors interested: Most analysts remain committed fans of the shares. Some claim that a $1 trillion valuation could soon be possible. The bullish case runs as follows. Apple has low penetration in the personal-computer and smartphone markets, and can hook millions more customers in emerging markets like China and Brazil. Although questions remain over how much of Apple’s innovation was due to its magician-in-chief, Steve Jobs, who died last October, the launch of the new iPad has calmed nerves somewhat. Apple is poised to enter new arenas like television and mobile payments. The firm still has a ton of cash to invest in new products and ward off emerging threats. Horace Dediu of Asymco, a data-analysis firm, has estimated that even after the dividend payout and any buy-back activity this year, Apple could still end 2012 with over $35 billion more in the bank than it had at the end of the previous year. With an historic price-earnings (p/e) ratio of 22, shares are not as dear as you might expect, and look even more attractive when the p/e is calculated based on forward earnings. Apple’s revenues are forecast to grow by at least 51% in fiscal-year 2012 and by 23% in 2013, according to Morgan Stanley. Others reckon that the outlook for its business is not the only thing that has been driving the steep ascent of Apple’s shares. The stock has seen such heavy gains in recent weeks that many investors can’t afford not to have Apple in their portfolio. Fund managers that are judged against a benchmark where Apple is heavily weighted, like the NASDAQ 100 or the S&P 500 technology index, have to scramble to keep a heavy exposure to Apple. “The speed of the move and the size of the company scare people who haven’t got it,” says Andy Ash of Monument Securities. “The danger is that you end up with everyone buying it because they have to rather than because they want to.” So what should we be looking for in the unique case study that is Apple? What signs that Apple stock's climb will level off, or even dip down? Read the full article here .

At Harvard Business Review , Nilofer Merchant has strong words for Yahoo's new leadership . It is time, Merchant says, to be "fearless." The first step is to figure out how the company got to where it is today, and she uses this graph to illustrate the point: Merchant: After working with dozens of complex companies and observing hundreds more, what I've learned is that the companies that create the next big thing are the ones who go beyond talking about doing things differently; they work through the denial, resistance and inaction, and truly shift and adapt. After all of the struggle, they finally both decide that they must, and they actually do. This appears to be where Yahoo has just arrived. A shift. Some movement in saying that what's worked in the past isn't working anymore, and it's time for a change. Bravo. Finally. This shift could be called "feckless to fearless." Feckless is when a company doesn't know its mission, is weak in its decision-making, and thus ineffective in its output. Fearless is seen in bold moves, created by people who trust one another, and backed up by accountability. This shift is the difference between freaking out at the possibility of an imperfect bold bet and making the worst of all choices: zero bold bets. In actually bringing in new talent and letting them lead you to new edges, instead of just saying it's time for a new approach. It's deciding to stop talking about the competitive threat, and instead asking what it will take to leapfrog those competitors. It is worrying less about getting it right, and more about getting started — now. Merchant's advice is directed simultaneously at Yahoo and at other companies that have lost their momentum. Read Yahoo's Shakeup Demands Fearlessness here .

Walter Isaacson has been hard at work finishing his biography of Steve Jobs . The book, out today, is the result of 40 interviews that Isaacson conducted with Jobs, and many more with Jobs's friends family and colleagues, over the last seven years. Isaacson spoke about Jobs on 60 Minutes . Here is an excerpt, in which Isaacson discusses Jobs's personal life, his early days as a complicated colleague at Atari, and how he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple computer from his parents' garage. We find the second half of this segment particularly interesting, as Isaacson discusses what some Apple employees refer to as Jobs's "reality distortion field," which seems to have made him a very difficult friend and colleague, but perhaps also explains some of his more surprising successes as a business leader. Watch the full interview here .

We went on the hunt for some of Steve Jobs 's top public moments, and we have selected two. First, this grainy old video from when he introduced the Macintosh personal computer to the world: Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984 from Vincent on Vimeo . And this is Jobs's speech at Stanford University's 2005 commencement. The message here is very personal. Jobs was speaking one year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His closing line to the graduates: "stay hungry, stay foolish":

Jeff Dyer , professor at Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Business , studies "disruptive innovators." And he says other business leaders can learn a lot by studying the ways in which these innovators come up with disruptive ideas through experimentation. In this Harvard Business Review IdeaCast , Dyer discusses techniques to introduce more innovative thinking in the workplace:

IBM is marking the 100th anniversary of its incorporation. And far from being a relic, IBM seems to have caught its stride once again in the last decades. Take a look at the company's market capitalisation compared to its young competitors in the tech sector (from The Economist ): It is a remarkable feat for any company, but especially so for a high tech company. IBM operates in a field where the basic foundation of business products changes rapidly. But, as The Economist details, the company has survived by doing what so many companies across a variety of fields fail to do. Its business was based on punch cards, but it did not allow itself to become a dinosaur when punch cards started to fade in favor of the early calculating machines. As leadership of the company passed from Thomas Watson, Sr., to Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM became the global leader in computing. From The Economist: Under the younger Watson, IBM became by far the world’s biggest computer-maker. He did the trick by betting the company on the System/360, IBM’s first family of mainframe computers, which took years and $5 billion (in 1960s dollars)—more than the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb—to develop. Launched in 1964, the System/360 became the first dominant computing platform, mainly because all the family’s machines, big or small, were “compatible”, meaning they could run the same software. By 1969 IBM’s market share had grown to 70%. It thus became the first IT company to be called an “evil empire” and aroused the ire of America’s antitrust authorities. The Reagan administration eventually dropped the case in 1982, asserting that it had been “without merit”. The second platform shift—from costly mainframes to “distributed” computing systems, including PCs—was a much closer shave. Even while the antitrust case was dragging on, technological progress had begun to undermine IBM’s near-monopoly and, more importantly, its business model of renting its expensive machines to customers. Since this was highly profitable, IBM was very slow to deliver cheaper and distributed computing systems, made possible by new processors. When these systems took off in the early 1990s, IBM’s business collapsed. Mainframe revenues dropped from $13 billion in 1990 to $7 billion in 1993 and losses of $16 billion piled up. “Only a handful of people understand how precariously close IBM came to running out of cash,” wrote Lou Gerstner, who was brought in to turn the company around, in “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?”, his book about the revival. He fired 35,000 employees to cut costs. The lesson of the story appears to be that companies that develop a strong sense of what the company is rather than being simply a vehicle for a certain product or certain type of product stands a better chance at long term success. Read IBM: 1100100 and counting here .