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I was invited recently to give a talk about entrepreneurship to 75 seniors in the electrical engineering department at San Diego State University. Their professor is Barry Dorr, a classic “give-back” guy, who did 35 years in the industry and is now full-time and all in on sharing and teaching electrical engineering. This guy lights […]

An icon of innovation — Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen — died in January. In 1997, he wrote a book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which changed management thinking for an entire generation. The book’s thesis was that the factors that helped the best companies succeed were also the reasons some of those same companies later […]

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, October 14, 2019 I earned a degree in English from a liberal arts college in Boston. I have joked often that this degree qualified me to do nothing. So I advised my children that if they followed in my footsteps, I would disown them because they would be doomed […]

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, March 4, 2019 “Let’s go for it.” Those words have been uttered thousands of times by countless men and women who have studied the landscape and after assessing the risks, after weighing the odds, after reviewing their team and their rations, they have charged ahead, “forward into the valley […]

The Origins Of OY! The word OY! (with the exclamation point) was first uttered by the shepherd, Oscar, in the year 1509 B.C.E. He had come down to the field to check on the sheep, and to his miserable surprise, he found that several of the sheep had been slaughtered by a mountain lion. But […]

Published in UT San Diego, February 19, 2013 Talking about the puzzle of startup investing, a famous Harvard Business School professor once said, “There is no perfect deal, but some deals are more perfect than others.” The perfect deal, he said, is a post office box to which people just simply sent checks. I have […]