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!
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:
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.
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 talks this month at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on the main points of his talk on business ethics:
Forthcoming: Our interview Professor Kline on David Hume, who, according to a recent vote by contemporary philosophers, is the most influential dead philosopher.
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.
During the Fall 2009 semester, CEE sponsored two essay contests. Cash prizes were awarded to the first place winners and honorable mentions in each contest. The essays were judged on their accuracy and depth of interpretation and their independence of thought.
The first contest was held in Professor Stephen Hicks’s Introduction to Philosophy course. Students were asked to write about the truth or falsity of the following Shakespeare line from Act II of Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Students related this line to one or more of their course books — Plato’s Apology and Crito, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and René Descartes’ Meditations. Congratulations to our five winners!
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The second contest was held in Professor Shawn Klein’s Business and Economics Ethics course. Students were asked to defend or criticize the following claim made by the character Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street: “Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.” Congratulations to our three winners!
Dr. Stephen Hicks, CEE’s Executive Director, talks with Dr. Jerry Kirkpatrick, a Fall 2009 CEE guest speaker, about his book, In Defense of Advertising. Dr. Kirkpatrick addresses several typical criticisms of advertising and explains why advertising is important to a healthy, productive capitalist society.
Dr. Stephen Hicks, CEE’s Executive Director, talks with Fall 2009 guest speaker Dr. Jerry Kirkpatrick about his recent book, “Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism”. Dr. Kirkpatrick compares and contrasts the educational philosophies and methods of John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and discusses the potential benefits of such methods in a capitalist society.
Dr. Stephen Hicks, CEE’s Executive Director, talked recently with Fall 2009 guest speaker Dr. Jerry Kirkpatrick about why having a philosophical background helps businesspeople attain greater clarity and confidence in making important, ethically-charged decisions. Below are parts I and II of the interview.
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. 
