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Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Disagreeable Discourse Solves Problems

  By Fred | November 16, 2011 - 1:00 am | ,
2 Comments

American Censorship Day was organized by a number of organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise awareness of legislation that is being developed in the United States that would significantly change free discourse available via internet technologies. And thus the image that covers the FrogBlog.biz header and that you are seeing in various places: I certainly don’t like everything I see on the internet. I am at various times annoyed, disgusted, and angered. But it is important to remember when things that are distasteful leak through, this is also the technology that helped bring some of the most totalitarian regimes left on earth to their knees. When free nations choose to censor what disgusts them, they are also providing cover to the regimes who chose to censor simple political discourse. For that reason alone any legislation that proposes to ‘fix’ the free wheeling style of the internet must be … Continue reading →

Think Can-Do In The New Year

  By Fred H. Schlegel | January 1, 2011 - 1:31 pm | ,
14 Comments

I’m sitting here New Year’s morning eyeing the Rose Bowl Parade, still chuckling from a traditional evening of Marx Brothers and thinking on the year to come. It’s been a year of change for the Schlegel household, change that has been absorbed, embraced and adapted to establish our next launchpad. Thanks to all who have taken part, helped and encouraged. I grew up in the sixties on a healthy mix of impossible plans, building models of Apollo Saturn V’s and experimenting with solar cells. While I didn’t pursue a life in space, the mindset that practically anything is within the reach of a determined group never left me. Call me a product of Chicago where Birnham’s charge still sets the tone: “Make no small plans: they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Double negative aside, it’s a neat way to live. Is there hope in the new year? I … Continue reading →

Sustaining Wealth Creation: Economic Recessions and Housing

  By Fred H. Schlegel | October 29, 2010 - 2:44 pm | ,
9 Comments

How do we get out of the current financial mess? “Do whatever you can to allow the start of new businesses,” said 2002 Economic Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith, who spoke Thursday night (10/28/2010) at Indiana University. In the history of recessions here and around the world, bubbles in the housing market are regularly more devastating to financial institutions and other parts of the economy than even larger disruptions elsewhere according to Smith, Professor of Economics at Chapman University. Over the past few years I’ve been frustrated by simplified explanations of our recent financial crisis that place all blame on a single element of our system rather than dealing with what is a rather complex and intermixed systemic failure. Smith’s background in experimental microeconomics and long experience with bubbles led him and his associate, Dr. Steven Gjerstad, to study historic recessions and try to identify the differences that lead to … Continue reading →

Being and Entrepreneurship

  By Fred H. Schlegel | November 20, 2009 - 10:40 am | ,
8 Comments

“Organizations tend to evolve in ways that are inherently resistant to entrepreneurship. Yet Entrepreneurship is instrumental for ensuring the long-term sustainability of any enterprise.” (Properties of balance: A pendulum effect in corporate entrepreneurship, Michael H. Morris, Jurie van Vuuren, Jeffrey R. Cornwall, Retha Scheepers) Whether you call it corporate entrepreneurship or individual creativity, it is difficult to drive behavior that challenges the status quo, questions existing procedures, or increases personal risk. “More fundamentally, fostering corporate entrepreneurship becomes problematic if company executives do not know what they are trying to achieve.” (Morris, et al) Finding balance in large organizations is difficult at best. The larger the group the further removed any single individual is from the source of cash flow, from the feel of customers, from the pulse of technological change. (You know, the smell of the sawdust, the feel of the earth type stuff.) The meaningfulness of any individual change … Continue reading →