Special Entrepreneurship Section in Wall Street Journal

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a special section on Small Business. Lots of good things in the section, including information on the Perils of Being the Little Fish, How to Sell on YouTube Without Showing a Video and other things of interest. They also ranked the Best Country to Start a Business (US ranks number three) in the World.

Greyston...Great Brownies...Fantastic Mission

Bill Mistretta, president of CEO of Greyston Bakery was on campus today talking about the extraordinary mission that defines this outstanding company. As Bill put it, they produce a simple product…brownies…but in the process they help change people’s lives by providing employment and support to people who need it. Greyston had been featured in many news stories (including one on 60 Minutes), and they are now featured in a new book by Michael Russo, “Companies on a Mission: Entrepreneurial Strategies for Growing Sustainably, Responsibly, and Profitably.”

The Dilbert Entrepreneur

This morning, while at the office working on two different workshops that are going on simultaneously(Syracuse Entrepreneurs Bootcamp and The Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans' Families) I took a break to glance through the Wall Street Journal….and ran across The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. So sit back, get a cup of coffee and enjoy entrepreneurship with a Dilbert flavor.

From the article:

I have always assumed there's a correlation between imagination and risk-taking. You wouldn't leave an unpleasant but relatively safe situation unless you could imagine a better outcome. So the people who leave a company first tend to be the visionaries who can best imagine entrepreneurial success. The last wave of people who leave are usually excreted just before the door is chained. They didn't imagine it would happen so soon. Bad management is how imagination gets wings.

Where in the World Do Ideas Come From?

Students are always walking into my office asking me where ideas come from. Thanks to Scott Nadzan, who sent this piece over to me on innovation, I now have an answer for them. Since I can't draw as well as this fellow, I'll send them to this piece on where good ideas come from. Steven Johnson, who is the author of this piece, has been a speaker at TED talks and provides a very interesting way to think about ideas.