Dr. Stephen Hicks, CEE’s Executive Director, talks with Federico Fernández and Martin Sarano, co-founders of Bases Foundation, on the political and economic climate in Argentina.

Part I:

Part II:

Jack Stack is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SRC Holdings Corporation, an award-winning, employee-owned organization based in Springfield, Missouri. Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation and its 22 subsidiaries provide a wide range of products and services, including engine remanufacturing, packing and distribution, business consulting and banking. SRC employs 1,600 people and generates annual revenues of about $400 million.

Kaizen: Where did you grow up?

Stack: I was born in Chicago in 1948. My father bought a house in Elmhurst, Illinois, and I lived in Elmhurst from the time that I was about three years old to about 30. Then I was transferred to Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve spent the last 31 years of my life.

Kaizen: It sounds like you were a wild card as a youth—you were kicked out of college and seminary and fired from a job at General Motors?

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Check out Entrepreneur Magazine‘s fascinating profile of Angelo Sotira, co-founder and CEO of DeviantART, a popular social network (over 14 million members) for visual artists of all kinds. Sotira and his colleagues created an innovative architecture to support online creative communities years before Facebook and MySpace, with features that those more famous social networks later appropriated. The article covers Sotira’s career, DeviantART’s history, its plans for the future, and also features a short video about Sotira and DeviantART.

Read it here.

In his recent article “Start-Up City,” Edward Glaeser traces New York City’s long history of innovative entrepreneurs from the sea trade industry to sugar refining to the garment industry to finance. Glaeser then discusses the dependence of the economy on entrepreneurs, the current perils New York faces, and how we can encourage more entrepreneurship.

Read the article at City Journal.

Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style, writes on the importance of self-delusion in entrepreneurship. We all know that most businesses fail, but the entrepreneur is in part motivated by an irrational confidence that she will succeed. Successful entrepreneurs, says Postrel, “overestimated their chances of striking it rich. But they beat the odds — to everyone’s benefit. These ‘lucky fools’ create new sources of wealth, new jobs, new industries offering less-risky opportunities, and new technologies that improve life. Society plays the role of the casino, enjoying the spillover benefits from foolish bets.”

Read the article at Big Questions.

Robert Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years. As director of public policy analysis for his last seven years there, he wrote speeches for the late Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in 2005 of fraud and conspiracy. Dr. Bradley is also founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C. He frequently writes and lectures on energy, political economy, and corporate governance. He is currently completing his seventh book, Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies, the second volume of a trilogy on political capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron. We met with Dr. Bradley in Houston to explore his thoughts on Enron, political capitalism, and the future of energy.

Kaizen: Why does the Enron case matter?

Bradley: Enron’s fall was front-page news in the United States and around the world. It was such a surprise that the company everyone thought was the best—the most innovative, most socially progressive, and so on—was revealed to be the very worst. Virtually everyone got fooled by the reversal, so it had tremendous mystery and appeal.

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“Though Kaizen is a tool used by corporations to achieve greater innovation, productivity, and general excellence, it’s also an approach, an approach that we can learn from and apply to our own lives as we strive for continuous improvement on a more personal level. We can call this ‘Personal Kaizen.’”
Read more at Presentation Zen.

In the new CEE-sponsored course, Entrepreneurship and Ethics, students were asked to develop in-depth case studies of a major entrepreneur’s life, character, style, challenges, and innovations. Student presentations included Stacy L. Moore on Andrew Mellon, Khetsiwe Dlamini on Richard Branson, Goran Mamic on Mayer Rothschild, and Bridget Markin on Coco Chanel. Below are brief video clips from their presentations.

Stacy L. Moore on Andrew Mellon

Khetsiwe Dlamini on Richard Branson

Goran Mamic on Mayer Rothschild

Bridget Markin on Coco Chanel

The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s program Teaching Innovation features some great resources for teaching the history of innovation, such as papers, lessons, and event audio and video. It includes a fascinating survey of the Top 25 Innovations in History, by Lawrence Husick who is a senior fellow at FPRI.

Are family businesses more or less successful in the long term? Robert Frank comments on the trials and tribulations of family businesses pointing to a U.S. Trust study of “ultra-high-net-worth” family businesses. That study finds that “[w]hile these families are highly successful in building and managing their businesses, they are often less successful when it comes to transitioning their companies from one generation to the next, with only 15 percent of family-owned companies lasting past the second generation.” The study identifies lack of succession and estate planning, and failure to implement asset protection strategies as core problems affecting family businesses’ inter-generational survival.

On the flip side, in his book Dynasties: Fortunes and Misfortunes of the World’s Great Family Businesses, David Landes tells the story of eleven successful family businesses and argues that “dynastic businesses offer a proven route to developing emerging markets, while companies managed by unrelated professionals and funded by public investors offer mostly bad jobs and slim profit shares to local employees” (Amazon.com).