Camera Obscura Cameras have been around for a long time. In their most basic form of image projection, it is said that they may have existed as long ago as 500 BC with the first one taking the form of pinholes in tents where light came through and was cast on another tarp or tent surface. Some go so far as to say there may have been similar Stone Age versions that gave rise to…
Snakes on the Plane I am somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean as I’m writing this. The Flight Tracker says we are still three hours out of Barcelona and will be landing about an hour later than scheduled. It was an interesting boarding procedure at Delta JFK. To begin with, our flight from San Diego arrived on time at Terminal Two and our Barcelona flight was scheduled to depart from Terminal Four. I’ve…
The Business of Teaching I just finished teaching my Law, Policy & Ethics course for two hours tonight in what felt like a 90 degree classroom (we are all asked to conserve energy during this heat wave). It wrung me out and felt like a hard day in the salt mine by the time I was done. There is nothing inherently hard about the course material or this particular class, since it was the introductory…
The Last Straw Not so long ago I wrote about my travails with AT&T and Verizon and the extremely annoying process of trying to cancel services I do not use and have not used for a while. I termed it a death throw for these telecom behemoths when they must resort to unscrupulous tactics to try to drain the last few drops out of the cow they have been milking dry. I thought that was…
Maybe Elon is Right Elon is a strange name. Google tells me it is the 950th most common boy’s name at this point with some 234 baby boys (and 5 baby girls) getting christened with that name last year. It is both a Biblical Hebrew name meaning Oak Tree and an African name meaning Spirit (technically, the individual that God loves). It’s not just God, we all gotta love Elon. If you absolutely have to…
Auto-Woke Part of upping my game as a professor this year is that I am trying to go beyond the technology platform I have used for the dozen years I have been teaching graduate business school. My approach to teaching has been to structure my lectures (which have all tended to be two to three hours in length) using PowerPoint slides. The Microsoft Office Suite has ruled my and many other people’s business life for…
The Business of Business I have spent forty-seven years in business. I know exactly how that happened. I entered college as an engineering student, typically strong in math and science, or so I thought. I say that with suspicion because where I went to school in Rome, I was way outside the mainstream of American educational enhancement and was quite out of it when it came to the current standards of excellence in high school…
Redefining Ethics It would be very easy to write endlessly about the revamping of the American and even global foundations of ethics in this crazy mixed-up time we are living through. I am spending some time right now updating the syllabus for my ethics course this fall. I taught the course for the first time this spring and I was surprised by two things. First of all, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of…
Surrendering to CostCo Everyone thinks that CostCo started in Kirkland, Washington, just outside of Seattle back in 1983, just when Howard Schultz was getting his hands on this little coffeehouse startup called Starbucks and starting to rev it up into a global retailing juggernaut. But by virtue of its merger with another big-box retailer named Price Club, CostCo can claim to have started back in 1976 right here in good old San Diego. The behemoth…
On Capitalism I am once again finding myself at Capitalism’s front doorstep as it seems to be assaulting my senses as I prepare the next term’s syllabus for my business ethics course. Technically the course is titled Law, Policy and Ethics and I am being sure to add more connective tissue between the three subjects rather than have this be a philosophy course on the etymology of ethics in business. When I launch my thinking…