Bruce Judson

Bruce Judson (born 1958 in New York City) is an American author, media innovator, and public policy analyst.

Education

Judson received his Bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, in Policy Studies in 1980, where he studied with the environmentalist Donella Meadows.^[1] In 1984, he received his Juris Doctor from the Yale Law School and his MBA from the Yale School of Management.^[2] At the Yale Law School, he was the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation^[3] and a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Career

Judson started his career as a consultant and founding member of the New York office of the Boston Consulting Group.^[4] In 1989, Judson joined Time Inc. Magazines, where he was appointed the Company’s first corporate Director of Marketing.^[5] After the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications led to the creation of Time Warner Inc., Judson’s corporate marketing department served as the focal point for Time Warner’s initiative to provide advertisers with advertising programs,^[6] involving entities throughout the media conglomerate.

Later, with the creation of Time Inc. New Media, Judson was appointed General Manager, where he was one of the co-founders^[7] of the Pathfinder (website). Walter Isaacson, then President of Time Inc. New Media, and the subsequent biographer of Steve Jobs, credits Judson with inventing the concept of the Web banner ad,^[8] which established the standardized system that enabled the rapid growth of Internet advertising.^[9]

While working at Time Inc. New Media, Judson wrote NetMarketing,^[10] which became a nationwide bestseller,^[11] and was excerpted in Advertising Age.^[12] He was named by Advertising Age as one of the nation’s "Cybermarketing Leaders."^[5] Judson’s activities at Time Inc. New Media are described in Michael Wolff’s bestselling book, Burn Rate.^[7]

After leaving Time Inc.,^[13] Judson accepted an appointment at the Yale School of Management as a Faculty Fellow,^[2] and was later promoted to Senior Faculty Fellow.^[14] At Yale, he developed and taught a clinical course^[14] offering free consulting to small businesses.^[15] Judson also served as one of the founding faculty members^[16] of the Yale Publishing Course, and as the first entrepreneur-in-residence at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute.^[17]

In 1999, Scribner published, HyperWars^[18] which Judson co-authored. The book asserted that significant changes in corporate strategies would be required for success in the coming Internet era. HyperWars was selected by Soundview Executive Book Summaries as one of the best business books published in the year of its release.

In 2004, HarperBusiness published Judson’s book, Go it Alone!^[19] which argued that the combination of software-as-a-service, automation, and outsourcing, enabled by the Internet would fundamentally alter the nature of entrepreneurship and small business success. In the book, Judson also asserted that as a result of automated leverage created by the Internet, small groups of people or individuals, working on their own, would be able to build high revenue businesses. The book was recognized by Library Journal as one of the best business books^[19] published in the year of its release, while Judson’s ideas on the future of entrepreneurship were the subject of dedicated interviews in business publications, such as The Wall Street Journal^[20] and Entrepreneur magazine.^[21]

Judson later partnered with HarperBusiness, to test the value of making the full text of Go It Alone! available free online, with advertising support. This first-of-its-kind effort in book publishing^[22] was featured in a US News and World Report cover story.^[23]

In 2012, the continuing significance of the ideas in Go It Alone was recognized by Entrepreneur magazine, which dedicated a feature story to the book, and its continuing popularity, at a time when the "half-life of business books" is short,^[24] while the website LifeHack recommended the book, twelve years after its initial publication, in a May 2016 article.^[25]

While involved at Yale and writing books, Judson was also active in developing independent businesses,^[26] including Web-Clipping (co-founder),^[27] (an early online news clipping service for businesses), the business broadband marketplace Speed Anywhere.,^[28] and a mobile Web site development firm.^[29]

Judson's book, It Could Happen Here,^[30] was published in 2009 by HarperCollins. The book argued that growing and extreme economic inequality in the United States was a societal danger. Judson worked with historical and social science research to construct a model which indicated that highly unequal societies are characterized by political polarization, anger, lack of trust, political paralysis, a collapsing middle class and potentially political instability.^[31] The book appeared two years before Occupy Wall Street led economic inequality to be considered a mainstream political issue, and at the time the significance of growing economic inequality was often disregarded or seen as unlikely to continue.^[32]

Judson was subsequently appointed a Braintruster at the Roosevelt Institute, where he launched a column titled Restoring Capitalism^[31] for the Institute’s website. Articles from the column were syndicated in online media including The Business Insider^[33] and The Huffington Post.^[34]

As of December 2015, Judson is a Senior Adviser to Tern Plc.^[35]

Publications

• NetMarketing: Your Guide to Profit and Success on the Net (Wolff New Media/Random House, 1996) ISBN 0-679-77031-3
• HyperWars: 11 Strategies for Survival and Profit in the Era of Online Business (with Kate Kelly)(Scribner, 1999) ISBN 0-684-85564-X
• Go It Alone! The Secret to Starting a Successful Business on Your Own (HarperBusiness, 2004) ISBN 0-06-073113-3
• It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink (HarperCollins, 2009) ISBN 978-0-06-188591-4

References