Professors Shawn Klein and Matt Flamm are conducting a new reading group this semester on Plato’s works on the trial and death of Socrates. From the flyer:

In 399 BCE, Athens executed Socrates for impiety and corrupting the youth. Plato immortalized the trial and death of Socrates in his dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. These are not merely historical dialogues, but philosophical treatises that examine the nature of piety, philosophy, justice, and death. The Reading Group will discuss each of these dialogues and the philosophical issues they raise.

Each meeting will take place at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship office on the second floor of Burpee, from 1-2pm. There will be light refreshments. A free copy of the book will be provided to participants.

Dates:
September 10: Overview and Introduction
September 17: Euthyphro
October 1: Apology
November 5: Crito
November 19: Phaedo

In our latest issue of Kaizen we feature an interview with Robert Bradley, Jr., former director of public policy analysis at Enron and currently the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research.

Also featured in Kaizen are: more Spring semester student essay contest winners – Brandon McNames and Matthew Weber; Guest Speaker Jeffrey Orduno; and another successful High School Entrepreneur Day.

A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post separately the full interview with Mr. Bradley.

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.

Philosophy professor Shawn Klein has successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation. Congratulations to Dr. Klein! More information about Professor Klein here: http://www.ethicsandentrepreneurship.org/professor-shawn-klein/

An article in New York Daily News covers the increasing demand for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s (NFTE) courses in our faltering economy. NFTE was founded by Kaizen interviewee Steve Mariotti, who states, “Kids are aware of how fragile a job is and they begin to think about how they could create a job if they had to.” The article also profiles several young graduates of the program who have become entrepreneurial success stories.

Shown above, NFTE graduate Steve Gordon, 18-year-old founder of TatooID.

Read the article here.

Read our full-length interview with Steve Mariotti.

Venture capitalist Kevin O’Connor, interviewed in the April 2009 issue [PDF] of Kaizen, is now co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. FindTheBest, as described by Mr. O’Connor, “was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way.”

He explains further: “I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their “top 10” recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting “kickbacks” from the sites they were recommending.”

His solution, FindTheBest, is now in beta version.  It allows the user to compare search results (similarly to travel websites like Expedia), and to narrow down the results by various criteria (much like browsing Amazon). Like Wikipedia, users can also contribute to the site, updating existing areas or creating new listings in which they have expertise.

Check out FindTheBest.com

Read Kevin O’Connor’s introduction to FindTheBest.

Read the full-length interview with Kevin O’Connor.

The Spring 2010 issue of The Journal of Private Enterprise, published by the Association of Private Enterprise Education, has just been released. It contains articles by leading Austrian School economists Israel Kirzner, Peter Boettke, and CEE guest speaker Steven Horwitz. See the journal’s website for more details.

Below is a short video interview of Steven Horwitz, conducted during his Spring 2009 visit.

The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) recently won a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for NFTE’s mathematics curriculum “Entrepreneurship: Owning Your Future”. From the announcement: “Written by NFTE Founder Steve Mariotti, the curriculum teaches fundamentals of mathematics as well as comprehensive guide to developing a business plan. It focuses on critical basic business skills including business communications, negotiating, business ethics, social responsibility, time management, and goal setting.” We interviewed Mr. Mariotti for the August 2009 issue of Kaizen (PDF). Read the full-length interview here.

Y Combinator, a company that provides seed funding to startups, has an excellent, in-depth list of entrepreneurship resources. Topics include how to start a business, why to start one in a bad economy, mistakes to avoid, and how to create wealth.

Entrepreneurship is becoming more popular in Brazil, despite the relative difficulty of starting a business there and the complexity of the country’s tax system.

Read more about the conditions driving Brazil’s entrepreneurship boom at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship Blog.

And not only that, Brazil has the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

John Chisholm is the founder, former CEO and chairman of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (now part of Google), and of CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools). A 30-year veteran executive of Silicon Valley, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He chairs the MIT Club of Northern California, serves as trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, as member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, and as mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. Previously, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, one of Stanford’s twelve independent laboratories; as a member of the visiting committee of the MIT Department of Mathematics; and as vice president of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association. He is author or co-author of two patents in online polling. We met with Mr. Chisholm in the San Francisco bay area to explore his thoughts on the benefits and challenges of entrepreneurship.

Kaizen: You have founded two high-tech companies, Decisive Technology and CustomerSat. Were you technically oriented as a youth?

Chisholm: I think you would say so. I liked to take clocks apart and try to figure out how the gears and springs worked together. I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, a small town about 20 miles north of West Palm Beach. In junior high school, my best friend Al Pion and I each memorized pi to over 100 decimal places—we would recite it alternating the digits, like tossing a ball back and forth. Talk about geeky!

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