Archive for 7 May 2008
Top Business Gurus
| Peter Klein |
Did you catch the list of Top Business Gurus in Monday’s WSJ? Based on Google, Lexis-Nexis, and academic citation indexes, it puts Gary Hamel at the top, followed by Tom Friedman, Bill Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Howard Gardner. Our own Jeff Pfeffer checks in at #11. Click the picture below for the entire list. Hamel, Stephen Covey, Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, and Tom Peters are obvious candidates for Guru Status, though the ranking algorithm produces some unlikely results too, such as Robert Reich and Myron Scholes.
Attack of the Identicons
| Peter Klein |
If you troll our comments threads you may notice that each commentator is identified by a little image, what WordPress calls an Avatar. Registered WordPress users can upload custom images to serve as their Avatars. Otherwise, each commentator is now represented by an Identicon, which is not a kind of alien Transformer but a math-based image derived from a user’s IP address. Hope you like your new online self!
Peter and Inspiration
| Randy Westgren |
Before enplaning for Vancouver, I spent a great day at the University of Missouri with Peter Klein and his (local) colleagues. I discovered that Peter and I share a common interest in the fiction of Richard Powers, a novelist whose works draw from the biological, physical, cognitive, and information sciences. Moreover, Peter acknowledged that his favorite Powers novel is The Gold Bug Variations; it’s my favorite as well. I finished my second reading on the airplane and found a passage that incites this post:
The world we know, the living, interlocked world, is a lot more complex than any market. The market is a poor simulation of of the ecosystem; market models will never more than parody the increasingly complex web of interdependent nature. (First edition, p. 411)
I agree that market models are pale abstractions compared to any ecosystem. But I have studied a great many models of ecosystems (dynamic system simulations, agent-based simulations, statistical models of species interactions, analytical models of populations) and find them to be pale abstractions of ecosystems, as well. I will propose — for refutation — that most market models I see are less interesting than ecosystem models; they are still undersocialized in the Granovetter sense. The ecological models seem to require more attention paid to the social interactions of the individuals.
Just a thought.
2008 Kauffman Data Symposium
| Peter Klein |
Next Tuesday, 13 May, is the proposal deadline for the 2008 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data. I participated in the 2007 version and got a lot out of it. This year’s event takes place in Washington, DC instead of Kauffman headquarters in Kansas City.
Documents from the 2007 symposium can be reviewed at SSRN.
A personal note: While driving to last year’s symposium I found myself on Kansas City’s Volker Boulevard, named for the great philanthropist William Volker, whose support was instrumental in the rebirth of Austrian economics in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The Volker Fund paid all or part of the salaries of Mises at NYU and Hayek at Chicago and employed Murray Rothbard as a consultant, book reviewer, and talent scout while he was writing Man, Economy, and State and America’s Great Depression. Wikipedia has some background information on the Volker Fund; you can find more in Hülsmann’s Last Knight (pp. 867-68 and passim) and Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (pp. 181-87 and passim). In Kansas City Volker is remembered as a generous philanthropist who supported schools and hospitals, developed a program for prison reform, and was a major benefactor of the University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri – Kansas City).
It would be nice to have a full-scale Volker biography. Anybody up to the task? Volker’s company and foundation records are housed at UMKC. Herb Cournelle wrote a short biography in 1951, Mr. Anonymous: The Story of William Volker, but I haven’t been able to locate a copy.
Organizations and Markets 
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