In one of the latest issues of The Economist, today’s corporate boss was compared to a shipwrecked Gulliver tied to the ground by Lilliputians. Two decades ago bosses were relatively unbound, but now things have changed, and they have to face bigger challenges.

First of all, they do not last long. According to the consultancy Booz & Company, among the world’s 2,500 biggest public companies, today departing CEOs keep their place for 6.6 years, compared to 8.1 years in 2000.

Moreover, fewer chief executives now chair their own boards. Even in the US, imperial bosses are not trusted anymore: the Corporate Library, a pressure group, stated that the proportion of CEOs of S&P 500 firms who are also the chairman fell from 78% in 2002 to 59% in 2010. The rise of institutional investors, such as mutual funds, has changed the way investors interact with managers.

Today, the vast majority of board members are outsiders and are more demanding, which has led to a big improvement in quality. In his new book Winning Investors Over, Baruch Lev of New York University’s Stern School of Business writes that investors often are a team of rivals for the CEO.

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A new kind of state capitalism started with the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, who grasped that Singapore needed to attract foreign investments. The country now has a highly developed and successful free-market economy, with major investments in pharmaceuticals and medical technology production.

Deng Xiaoping, as leader of the Communist Party of China, was another important reformer who led China towards a market economy. He invested in research and development and created special economic zones for Western foreign companies, applying the Western corporate model to state companies.

Since the late 1970s, China has in fact moved from a closed, centrally planned system to a more market-oriented one that plays a major global role in the world economy. Political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote a book called The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations, where he describes China as the primary driver for the rise of state capitalism as a challenge to the free market economies of the developed world.

iTunes 10.5.3 and iBooks 2.0 let students and professors use textbooks and course materials on iPads, and iBooks Author is a Mac desktop app to create books for the tablet. There are 1.5 million iPads and 20,000 educational apps currently in use in education. Notes can be added to individual pages and aggregated into virtual 3 × 5-inch note-cards for revision.

iBooks 2 is a free app, whereas textbooks themselves will cost $14.99 or less: much cheaper than traditional $80 textbooks. To ensure that there are plenty of titles on offer, Apple has struck deals with the major textbook publishers, including Pearson and McGraw Hill.