Category: Entrepreneurs

Chihuly Victimized by His Own Success

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Regina Hackett:

But at age 64, he’s where he never wanted to be, in court. He’s suing two glass blowers for copyright infringement, contending they’re imitating his work. They’re threatening to sue him back, questioning whether Chihuly is the creative intelligence behind the art bearing his signature. And a former dealer is attacking him with a gusto rare in the art world. If that’s not enough, his feet hurt.

Emotionally, he has been through the wringer.

Since 2001, a significant number of the people closest to him have died, some without warning. Partially because both his brother and father died in quick succession in his teens, he tends to experience each death as a blow to the body.

Last year he sank into a depression from which he is now recovering. Friends who haven’t seen him in many months are being invited over for dinner.

Chihuly’s work lights up the Kohl Center’s entrance – adding color to an emotionless sea of grey.

More B-Schools Add Sales Courses

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Ronald Alsop:

A company’s sales force is its lifeblood. But you’d never know it by looking at the typical M.B.A. curriculum.

Because they’re lighter on theory and research than other academic subjects, sales courses are surprisingly scarce in M.B.A. programs. “It’s sad that something as important to the economy as sales shows up as a footnote in the principles of marketing course at most graduate business schools,” says Andy Zoltners, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which has long offered a sales-force management class.

But the sales function seems to be slowly gaining more respect as a few other major schools, including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina, create M.B.A.-level sales courses. Harvard Business School has taught sales management for many years, but lately it has been focusing more on the selling process itself, with lessons on making sales presentations to corporate customers, influencing people and closing the deal.

“Many people view selling as tactical and haven’t taken the broader view that you will need sales skills even if you aren’t managing a sales force,” says David Godes, an associate professor at Harvard. “If you’re going into banking or consulting, how do you get clients and how do you raise money?”

It’s about time. Superior salespeople are always in short supply. They succeed based on solid, long term relationships.

Godin on Financing Your Startup

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Seth Godin:

I’m frequently asked (by friends, and sometimes, aggressive strangers) to help them find someone to fund their company. Often, but not always, these people are happy to hear the following answer.

1. If you fund your company, even a little, you’ve just sold it. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but one day. That’s because rational investors are funding your company in the expectation that you are going to sell it and make them a profit. (sure there are exceptions, but not many). So, if you don’t expect that your company will be easy to sell for a big profit, or you don’t ever want to sell your company, it’s not a smart idea to raise money for it.

Making a Market in Talent

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Lowell L. Bryan, Claudia I. Joyce, and Leigh M. Weiss:

Savvy companies understand the competitive value of talented people and spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals wherever they can be found. The trouble is that too many companies pay too little attention to allocating their internal talent resources effectively. Few companies use talented people in a competitively advantageous way—by maximizing their visibility and mobility and creating work experiences that help them feed and develop their expertise. Many a frustrated manager has searched in vain for the right person for a particular job, knowing that he or she works somewhere in the company. And many talented people have had the experience of getting stuck in a dead-end corner of a company, never finding the right experiences and challenges to grow, and, finally, bailing out

How Wisconsin Lost Its Big Advantage in the Ginseng Game

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Jane Zhang:

In a cramped shop filled with stale aromas of Chinese herbs, Keary Drath, a stout Wisconsin farmer and self-appointed ginseng sleuth, picked up a dry, wrinkly ginseng root, broke it in half and chewed it.

Clerks and customers of Ginseng City Trading Inc., stopped haggling in their rapid-fire Mandarin and stared. “From China,” he declared. “Not Wisconsin.”

“What’s the difference?” asked a shocked customer, Max Chen, who has used ginseng for 20 years. “They all say it is Wisconsin ginseng. I know Wisconsin’s is superior.”

Mr. Drath, 42 years old, wishes he had an easy way for Mr. Chen and millions of other ginseng buyers in Asia and in Chinatowns all over the world to make the distinction. The future of Wisconsin’s century-old ginseng farming business, now under attack by global rivals, depends on it.

The root has been worshiped as an energy-balancing folk medicine for 5,000 years. Ginseng — or Ren Shen, meaning “Man Root,” in Chinese — has two types. American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) has a cooling effect. Asian ginseng (Panax ginseng) provides a hot rush of energy.

With its rich loam, sunlight and cool summers, Wisconsin — especially Marathon County in the central part of the state — produces premium American ginseng. It is more potent and more bitter than American ginseng grown elsewhere.

To an untrained eye, dried Wisconsin roots look the same as those produced in great quantity in Canada and China. Mislabeling and product mixing abound.

And that is threatening the livelihood of Wisconsin’s ginseng farmers, whose roots trace back to the early 1900s when the four Fromm brothers began cultivating ginseng in Marathon County. Ginseng isn’t easy to cultivate: It takes four to five years to grow ginseng under wood or fabric canopies.

“Kids are easier to raise than ginseng,” says Stephen Kaiser, 59, of Rozellville, Wis., who has been grown ginseng since 1977. “Kids only get colds, flu or pneumonia, but ginseng, it tends to die very easily.”

Warren Buffett’s Annual Shareholder Letter

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Is now online – pdf.

Charlie and I are extraordinarily lucky. We were born in America; had terrific parents who saw that we got good educations; have enjoyed wonderful families and great health; and came equipped with a “business” gene that allows us to prosper in a manner hugely disproportionate to other people who contribute as much or more to our society’s well-being. Moreover, we have long had jobs that we love, in which we are helped every day in countless ways by talented and cheerful associates. No wonder we tap dance to work. But nothing is more fun for us than getting together with our shareholder-partners at Berkshire’s annual meeting. So join us on May 6th at the Qwest for our annual Woodstock for Capitalists. We’ll see you there.

Apathy, The Downside of Everything

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Ed Wallace:

No, instead I’m concerned about our country’s lack of vision for the future and the can-do attitude that we seem somehow to have lost — at least, it’s missing from most discussions on issues facing us today. In a nutshell, I’m lamenting the apparent mortal illness of optimism and ingenuity — the kind of spirit and drive that ignores all the negative issues in the news, the naysayers and the partisans and simply presses forward, driving toward solutions that benefit all of society.

I know we had that once, because the car industry as we know it today was not the invention of large and well-funded corporations. It was created and delivered by men who, though they often worked against the most incredible odds, never lost sight of their dreams and visions. With that focus — which often earned them scorn and insults — they changed the world for the better in a way that centuries of innovation hadn’t. And they did it in mere decades.

An Interview with Errol Morris

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Megan Cunningham interviews UW Grad and noted film and advertising impresario Errol Morris [pdf]:

Within the entertainment industry, Errol Morris holds a chameleon position. To the commercial production world, he’s established as a highly successful director, both innovative and intelligent. (He’s one of the only, if not the only, director of TV commercials who has written an opinion-page article published in The New York Times.) Within talent and advertising agencies, he is known for his exceptional off-kilter vision, and honored in ways usually reserved for noncommercial artists. (In November 1999, his work received a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, the organizers of the Academy Awards asked him to direct the short film that introduced the annual Oscars ceremony; it featured a series of real-life characters—some well-known, some everyday citizens—describing their passion for
movies.) In a 2004 Adweek article honoring Morris’s contributions as someone who “rises above the fray to create work that resonates and inspires,”

Errol Morris

Blodget on Amazon’s Music Strategy

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Henry Blodget:

The WSJ reported Amazon’s plans to offer an Amazon-branded iPod competitor and digital music download store. I haven’t done much work in this area yet, so please weigh in, but this strikes me as a startlingly bad move.

First, Amazon’s entry into this business is shockingly and annoyingly late. As with the Netflix DVD business, Amazon could have owned this category, but in the name of moving deliberately (or of trying to become all things to all people), it allowed other competitors to build a dominant market position. No matter what the company says, winning significant market share in digital music is going to be much harder now than it would have been three years ago.