A charming story from Martin Fridson’s How to Be a Billionaire about Rose Blumkin, founder of an Omaha furniture store that Warren Buffett eventually purchased: “Barely literate in English, the Russian-born immigrant parlayed a $500 investment into Nebraska Furniture Mart, the nation’s largest furniture store, with an astounding two-thirds of the total market in Omaha. […]
Rose Blumkin | Entrepreneur Read More »
How well do entrepreneurial success traits (creative rationality, initiative, courage, perseverance, and so on) map onto virtue ethics? An audio edition [mp3] of my 2009 essay “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” [pdf], first published in Journal of Private Enterprise. Or at YouTube: Abstract: Entrepreneurship is increasingly studied as a fundamental and foundational economic
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I’m a fan of Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz’s From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity. I wrote about it here. It’s about Economics 2.0, as they call it, one key feature of which is putting the entrepreneur front and center — in contrast to much of traditional
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My short essay on “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” [pdf] was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise in 2009, just when entrepreneurism was beginning to get attention in the business ethics literature. The abstract: “Entrepreneurship is increasingly studied as a fundamental and foundational economic phenomenon. It has, however, received less attention as
“What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” — text and audio versions Read More »
What makes entrepreneurs tick? An interesting paper: “Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation”, by Vivek Wadhwa et al., part of the Kauffman Foundation Small Research Projects. The paper’s abstract: “Entrepreneurs are among the most celebrated people in our culture. Celebrity entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, often
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Entrepreneurial Living, edited by Stephen R. C. Hicks and Jennifer Harrolle. In this volume of interviews with entrepreneurs from six countries and seven U.S. states, we explore the adventure—and the hard-headedness—of business. What makes for entrepreneurial success—and failure? To what extent is flourishing a matter of ideas, or of key decisions, or of persistent action,
“Lo que la Ética Empresarial Puede Aprender del Emprendimiento.” [HTML] [PDF]Stephen R.C. HicksDepartamento de Filosofía y Centro para la Ética y el EmprendimientoRockford University, Illinois, USA Publicado por primera vez en The Journal of Private Enterprise 24(2), 2009, 49-57.Traducido al Español por Walter Jerusalinsky, Idóneos, 2013. Resumen: El emprendimiento se está estudiando cada vez más
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Reprising this opening to my essay “How Can We Make Entrepreneurs?”: “As a kid, Steve Jobs hated school. Many of us can relate, even if we are not brilliant business innovators. School bored the young Jobs painfully, and he reacted by engaging in acts of disobedience and defiance. ‘I was pretty bored in school,’ he
Why Steve Jobs hated school, and how not to sabotage young future entrepreneurs Read More »