Dr. Douglas Rasmussen, our final guest speaker of Spring 2010, gave two lectures at Rockford College recently. Dr. Rasmussen is professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York and is coauthor (with Douglas J. Den Uyl) of Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2005). Here, Dr. Stephen Hicks interviews Dr. Rasmussen about his talk on Philippa Foot’s book Natural Goodness, given to Professor Klein’s Ethical Theory class:
Two weeks ago, the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship explored entrepreneurship in Turkey. Now Jonathan Ortmans looks at Saudi Arabia and finds a very entrepreneurial country. For example, it is ranked number 13 out of 183 economies for “ease of starting a business” (the U.S. is number 8).
In our latest issue of Kaizen we feature an interview with John Chisholm, founder of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (and now part of Google), and CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools).
Also featured in Kaizen are: this semester’s Introduction to Philosophy student essay contest winners – Bronson Garcia, Mona Khalifeh, and Erica Price; Guest Speaker William Kline; and news about our professors.
A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post separately the full interview with Mr. Chisholm.
If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.
The Kauffman Foundation’s Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship has a fascinating article on entrepreneurship in Turkey. Why, asks author Jonathan Ortmans, does Turkey have such a low rate of entrepreneurship when it is so strong economically?
Jeffrey Orduno, Rockford College alum and associate at McGreevy Williams, gave a CEE-sponsored talk last week at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on property rights and the law:
Dr. Kline, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, gave two CEE-sponsored talks this month at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume:
Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies. She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx, the advisory board of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). We met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Kaizen: What was it like growing up in a high-powered science-and-engineering family?
Estrin: That’s hard to answer because I don’t know anything but growing up steeped in science. A lot of the trips we took during the summer were to academic scientific conferences throughout the world. As I talk about in the preface of Closing the Innovation Gap, it wasn’t just that my parents were both academics, but both were Ph.D.s in electrical engineering — it was quite rare at the time for a woman to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. And so I just grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by academics and scientists.
In a recent Forbes article, Sramana Mitra asks whether business schools that emphasize raising venture capital over bootstrapping set up their students for failure in the “real world.” First-time entrepreneurs typically don’t have the track record necessary to secure venture capital, so if they see it as their only option they may never get their business off the ground. It’s a testament to CEE Professor Jeff Fahrenwald’s Entrepreneurship course that bootstrapping and venture capital are both given equal consideration as appropriate funding tactics.
Motherhood brings many joys and challenges, but some mothers also “struggle with giving up their adult identity, the ability to interact with other adults on an intellectual, problem-solving level,” says mother and entrepreneur Sara Sutton Fell. In a profile by Sramana Mitra, Ms. Fell describes how entrepreneurship helped her to regain the values she had been missing as a stay-at-home mom.
