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Tag Archives: Strategic_Shifts

Sustainable Business: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

  By Fred H. Schlegel | February 24, 2011 - 7:00 am | ,
8 Comments

I just clicked ‘checkout’ for a few pounds of Dean’s Beans. Haven’t tried them before, but wanted to after hearing Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans and author of Javatrekker: Dispatches From the World of Fair Trade Coffee, speak tonight at Indiana University. “I don’t believe social justice is a formula, I believe it is a process.” Passionate and positive, he shared his ideas on how socially responsible business practice and respect for quality of life can help change the world. Sustainable business is all the rage, but efforts at many companies seem to get holed up in the marketing department or as purely charitable exercises. I asked Dean if he thought large organizations could change over to the sustainable thinking his company emulates: “For a pre-existing large scale organization it’s hard because people are already in there looking for profit. […] However, when a corporation starts out and says these are … 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 →

How Do You Value Relationships? How Does Facebook?

  By Fred H. Schlegel | May 18, 2010 - 1:15 pm | ,
26 Comments

While searching for a family heirloom my mom came across her mom’s high school autograph book. Most of the inscriptions are from 1881 and in verse. It’s a beautifully tooled leather booklet. Gives the autographs some weight, some feeling. It was fun leafing through. Most of the inscriptions are in verse. My mother tells me that her father and mother often traded poetic notes with each other and it looks like the practice was widespread, at least in this neck of the woods. While I’m sure many of the verses were used multiple times among many friends, each page provides a touch of personality — a small window into the lives of people I never knew. It felt very personal. “My friends in my album I ask you to write, but to tear out the leaves I deem impolite.    A. Maiers” Annie had a sense of humor. As did Jeannie: … 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 →