Archive for March, 2009
The Human Side of Business – Resources
March 20th, 2009 | post a comment
This week we’re looking at business beyond the number. Join us as we explore how an over-reliance on numerical formulas and data analysis has blinded many businesses to the importance of human interaction. We’ll look at how empathic connections build successful company cultures and the cost some businesses pay for ignoring the human side of their employees and clients.
Listen to the Full Episode | Download MP3
Dev Patnaik, Author, Wired to Care,
Founder & CEO, Jump Associates |
Dev Patnaik is a founder and principal of Jump Associates, a consulting firm that helps companies innovate. Together with his teammates, he works with visionary business leaders to identify new markets, reinvent existing categories, and define new products and services. Dev is a trusted advisor to senior executives at some of America’s most admired companies, including General Electric, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target and Hewlett-Packard.
When he’s not working at Jump, Dev moonlights down the road at Stanford University as an adjunct professor, where he teaches design-research methods to undergraduate and graduate students. Since 1999, he has taught a course called Needfinding. In the class, students draw upon methods from anthropology, design and business planning to discover insights about ordinary people and create new products. While the class is required for all Design majors, it’s become a favorite of students from the Business School, School of Education and even Computer Science. As apples don’t fall far from the tree, Dev has a Bachelor’s degree in Product Design from Stanford.
Prior to founding Jump, Dev was the Director of Design at Forbes Marshall, a manufacturer of industrial process controls based in India. Dev led the development of Forbes Marshall’s internal design capabilities, creating programs in product design, exhibit design and corporate identity. Dev also led the company’s product strategy initiative, which eventually led him to work in the crossover space between design and business planning. After a stint with a strategy firm in Chicago, Dev returned to California to help found Jump in 1997.
Shawn Boyer, Founder & CEO, SnagAJob.com
2008 National Small Business Person of the Year |
Shawn Boyer founded SnagAJob.com in 1999, and since then, he has taken the company from being a start-up to the nation’s largest part-time and hourly job-posting site. In 2008, Shawn was named the nation’s Small Business Person of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration. That same year, he also saw one of his most ambitious goals for the company come true when SnagAJob.com was named a Best Small & Medium Company to Work for in America by the Great Places to Work Institute.
Prior to starting SnagAJob, this big thinker and passionate leader was actually a transactional attorney for Brown & Wood LLP (now Sidley Austin, LLP) and Watt, Tieder, Hoffar & Fitzgerald, LLP. He holds a Master of Law in taxation from Georgetown University Law Center, a Juris Doctor from Washington & Lee University, and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the College of William and Mary.
Aside from mowing lawns in middle school, Shawn’s first hourly job was in a retail store in his sophomore year in high school. “From day one, that job taught me that the customer is absolutely the organization’s lifeblood, that they drive the business, and that you need to bend over backwards to wow them.” That same philosophy is embraced throughout SnagAJob.com today.
The Human Side of Business
March 20th, 2009 | post a comment
This week we’re looking at business beyond the number. Join us as we explore how an over-reliance on numerical formulas and data analysis has blinded many businesses to the importance of human interaction. We’ll look at how empathic connections build successful company cultures and the cost some businesses pay for ignoring the human side of their employees and clients.
Listen to the Full Episode | Download MP3
Dev Patnaik, Author, Wired to Care,
Founder & CEO, Jump Associates |
Download MP3
Shawn Boyer, Founder & CEO, SnagAJob.com
2008 National Small Business Person of the Year |
Download MP3
The Language of Business – Resources
March 13th, 2009 | post a comment
On this week’s Business Matters, we’re examining at ways for business leaders to use the power of language to be a more effective. We’ll talk with a poet and a professor of ethics at Harvard, both of whom have explored how language and storytelling can be used in business.
Listen to the Full Episode | Download MP3
Joe Badaracco, Author, Question of Character,
Professor of Business Ethics, Harvard Business School |
Download MP3
Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., is the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School. He is also Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program. Badaracco has taught courses on business ethics, strategy, and management in the School’s MBA and executive programs. Badaracco is a graduate of St. Louis University, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar, and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA and a DBA. He has also been chairman of the Harvard University Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and has served on the boards of two public companies. Badaracco has taught in executive programs in the United States, Japan, and many other countries and has spoken to a wide variety of organizations on issues of leadership, values, and ethics.
Badaracco’s research focuses on business ethics, particularly on leadership and individual decision making, and he has written four books on these topics. These are Business Ethics: Roles and Responsibilities, Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right, and Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing. His most recent book, Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership through Literature, was published in April, 2006. It presents the lessons for leaders suggested by works of serious literature.
David Whyte, Poet, Lecturer, Author, The Three Marriages;
Founder, Many Rivers Company |
Download MP3
Poet David Whyte is the author of six books of poetry, and two best selling prose books, he holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes the Amazon and the Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops.
In addition to his six volumes of poetry, including his latest volume River Flow: New and Selected Poems, David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, an audio lecture series and an album of poetry and music. His newest prose book The Three Marriages: Understanding the Essentials of Work, Self and Relationship.
An Associate Fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many European, American and international companies. In organizational settings, using poetry and thoughtful commentary, he illustrates how we can foster qualities of courage and engagement; qualities needed if we are to respond to today’s call for increased creativity and adaptability in the workplace.
The Language of Business
March 13th, 2009 | post a comment
On this week’s Business Matters, we’re examining at ways for business leaders to use the power of language to be a more effective. We’ll talk with a poet and a professor of ethics at Harvard, both of whom have explored how language and storytelling can be used in business.
Listen to the Full Episode | Download MP3
Joe Badaracco, Author, A Question of Character,
Professor of Business Ethics, Harvard Business School |
Download MP3
David Whyte, Poet, Lecturer, Author, The Three Marriages;
Founder, Many Rivers Company |
Download MP3
The Business of Entrepreneurship – Resources
March 6th, 2009 | post a comment
Listen to the Full Episode | Download MP3-
Part 1: Thom Ruhe, Director of Entrepreneurship, Kauffman Foundation| Download MP3
Thom Ruhe is director of entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In addition to guiding several new initiatives within the foundation, he is leading a joint venture between the Foundation and the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce focused on leveraging America’s entrepreneurial leadership to advance economic growth in the United States and around the world.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Ruhe was the founding Chief Marketing Officer for JumpStart, a nonprofit economic development organization created to accelerate the growth of high-potential, early-stage companies in Northeast Ohio. While there, he and his staff served as adjunct staff to venture financed portfolio companies and directed the creation of an online social networking site for entrepreneurs, angel investors, business mentors and service providers; known as IdeaCrossing.
Formerly, Ruhe was president of Optiem LLC, where he led the growth of a nascent marketing practice to a nationally recognized interactive marketing, communications and public relations agency. Earlier in his career, Ruhe held consultative positions in technology integration, marketing, finance, sales, and management. His experience spans several entrepreneurial endeavors as well as working with Fortune 500 companies.
Part 2: Judith Roussel, Acting Regional Director, Small Business Administration | Download MP3
Judith Roussel has served as Illinois District Director of the SBA since December, 1999. In this capacity, she is responsible for the promotion and delivery of U.S. government programs providing Capital Access, Entrepreneurial Development, International Trade Development and Procurement Assistance to more than 1 million small businesses in the state of Illinois. Programs are delivered through SBA staffs in Chicago and Springfield, Illinois, as well as by major resource partners, including SCORE: Counselors to America’s Small Business, and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) Small Business Development Center Network.
For nearly a decade, Roussel served as Associate Administrator in business development and procurement policy-making positions at SBA’s Headquarters in Washington, DC. She was responsible for development of programs and strategies to assure small businesses a fair share of the nearly $300 Billion annual federal contracting budget. Chief among her accomplishments was the negotiation and implementation of a public/private partnership agreement with General Motors, Ford and Daimler Chrysler under which the three auto makers increased purchases from minority-owned businesses by more than $3 Billion over a three year period.
During her tenure in Washington, Roussel served as the SBA Senior Procurement Executive and was the 1999-2000 Co-Chairman of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA) Board of Advisors. She served as the U.S. Government’s Representative to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Small Business Procurement Subcommittee and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) SME Procurement Summit in Taipei, Taiwan. She served as an Expert Presenter before the United Nations World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland and co-authored a guidebook for developing nations on using public procurement systems to develop a strong small business sector.
Related Links:
-March 24, Illinois Small Business Economic Recovery Forum
-SCORE Chicago, Small Business Counselors
-May 17-22, National Small Business Week
The Business of Entrepreneurship
March 6th, 2009 | post a comment
This week on Business Matters, we’re examining entrepreneurship and venture capitalism in the new economic world. Find out how things are changing in the world of start-ups, and why they are so vital to producing the jobs we need in the United States. We’ll talk to a regional head of the US Small Business Administration and the director of the entrepreneurship program of one of the country’s largest foundations, as we look at ways for entrepreneurs to weather the economic storm and take advantage of emerging opportunities.
Listen to the Full Episode | Download MP3-
Part 1: Thom Ruhe, Director of Entrepreneurship, Kauffman Foundation| Download MP3
Part 2: Judith Roussel, Acting Regional Director, Small Business Administration | Download MP3
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