Last month I promised a daily habit of creation. What I’ve learned since then is that you have have any two of: international travel, jet lag, and blogging. But that doesn’t mean a pause to the habit. In fact, the jet lag is from 35 hours of flying from Seattle to Nairobi, with a stop in Dar es Salaam. Below are two videos from my stop in Tanzania. And in a week or two I’ll post...
American banks fail when unregulated, and they fail when improperly regulated. That is the one sentence summary of Broken Bargain by Kathleen Day, the latest book in my series trying to understand how the financial system is failing. My key learnings from his book are highly unlikely what the author intended. She’s a bit too anti-bank for my taste. We’d seem to agree on 99% of what is...
This idea of corporations with a purpose beyond just shareholders continues to be discussed in the news. This week in The Economist published an op-ed “What Corporations are for” ($), repeating the Friedman Doctrine and dissing the 181 signers of at the Business Roundtable earlier this month. The key word in the Economist’s essay is their measure of success of American business...
This year I turned 50 and and with that half century milestone, I’ve been looking back quite a bit more than normal this year. Case in point, in my recent post on the $80 trillion world economy, I pointed out there that the U.S. economy is one quarter of the total, or $20 trillion. 50 years ago, back in 1969, the U.S. economy was only $1 trillion (World Bank, reported in non-inflationary...
Today I hosted a delegation of 8 Korean college students brought to Seattle for a week by Kickstart Investment, a Korean business incubator. Sounds exotic, but I host a handful of foreign delegations each year from all around the world, often hosted by the U.S. State Department. It’s a fun way to meet entrepreneurs and people who help entrepreneurs without the accompanying jet lag. We...
My daily creation habit includes quite a variety of creations: blog posts, podcasts, videos, books, and a semi-weekly newsletter for Fledge. A sample of the newsletter is below. Here in 2019, the key to building a brand is being seen online, and the key to being seen is publishing content. As often as you can. As widely disbursed as you can, to reach into all the various corners of the digital...
When the news talks about “the economy” they always talk about percentages, especially growth or recession. Meanwhile, the U.S. GDP (a flawed but popular measure) is almost $20 trillion, almost one quarter of the $80 trillion world economy. The $80 Trillion World Economy in One Chart Put the pretty picture and the giant numbers aside for a moment and take a step back. The U.S. news is...
I’m in the middle of yet-another economics history book and came across the fact that investors in the first Bank of the United States purchased their shares for $25 in gold, then the remaining $375 in a mix of gold and other means. The book then continued on to talk about how the bank functioned. But not me. I was sitting there wondering what other currency those investors were using, as...
100 years ago, in 1919, the Michigan Supreme Court made a comment in their ruling of Dodge v. Ford saying (in its common paraphrased form), “The purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value.“ In 1970, Nobel Laureate in economics Milton Friedman repeated this in an essay in the New York Times entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits...
My pledge a week ago was a Daily Habit of Creation, not a daily blog post. I did promise to share the day’s creation on the blog, so today the question is to you… have you listened to the podcast? Did you know The Next Step: Podcast exists? That channel is primarily focused for entrepreneurs. It’s a mix of lessons from The Next Step books, plus interviews with entrepreneurs and...
