Hurricanes, oil spills, and Louisiana politics — the latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with entrepreneur Jay Lapeyre, CEO of The Laitram Corporation.
I met with Lapeyre in New Orleans to discuss natural disasters and corrupt politics, leadership, and the state of American manufacturing in our global economy.
Chan Luu’s designs have been worn by many celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock, Janet Jackson, and Jennifer Aniston. Much of the interview was published last month in Kaizen. I met with Luu in Los Angeles to discuss growing up in Vietnam, the relevance of business education to entrepreneurial success, and the complexities of doing business in the fast-changing world of celebrities and fashion.
The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens.
Rocket Singh takes up negative themes of corrupt in sales, bribery, and conflicts of interest, but the emphasis is on the positive: the sources of self-respect, win-win business relations, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. I responded to the very human challenges of honesty, integrity, necessity as the mother of invention and ingenuity, growing pains, guts, and semi-redemption.
Stating the themes abstractly like that could make Rocket sound saccharine and didactic, but it works as a real movie, with engaging characters, tension, and drama.
Here is a simplified flowchart, developed for my business ethics courses, reflecting my understanding of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis.
Let me emphasize that this is only about the subprime contribution of the overall crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enabled much spillover into non-subprime mortgage sectors, government-set capital requirements and other regulations enabled the AAA ratings of mortgage-based securities that encouraged speculators, and there were plenty of imprudent and unscrupulous characters in the private sector too.
Entrepreneurship and Fashion Design. The latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with entrepreneur Chan Luu, whose designs have been worn by many celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock, Janet Jackson, and Jennifer Aniston.
I met with Luu in Los Angeles to discuss growing up in Vietnam, the relevance of business education to entrepreneurial success, and the complexities of doing business in the fast-changing world of celebrities and fashion.
Also featured in this issue of Kaizen [pdf] are student essay contest winners Farzaneh Farhangi, Kelly Foster, and Rebecca Robinson, guest speaker Douglas Den Uyl, who visited us from Indianapolis, and, guest speakers Federico Fernández and Martin Sarano, who visited us from Argentina.
“The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you.”
Excellent. My only question: Should that be sad news or empowering news?
the latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with entrepreneur Jay Lapeyre, CEO of The Laitram Corporation. 
The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens. 
