Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Character and entrepreneurship

Business education is often good at teaching useful business theories and skills but less often good at teaching ethics. Ethics is often seen as irrelevant or as an obstacle, so business ethics is either not included in the core business curriculum or offered as an elective ornament.

Claim: Ethics is organically central to business success, and should be so built into business education. Two quotations from giants of American business in support.

First, from Georges Doriot, one of America’s trailblazing venture capitalists, as quoted in Jeffrey Young’s Forbes Greatest Technology Stories:

“Doriot spends most of his time talking to people who bring him prospective investments. He says he has considered no less than 5,000 of them since 1946. He is considered by friends and critics alike as a brilliant judge of character. But he has to be, he explains. ‘When someone comes in with an idea that’s never been tried, the only way you can judge is by the kind of man you’re dealing with’” (p. 101).

Second, from financier J. P. Morgan, who was once asked whether money was always loaned out based on one’s assets. Morgan replied, “No, sir, the first thing is character.” And, Morgan continued, if someone he couldn’t trust asked for funding, he wouldn’t make the loan even if he had “all the bonds in Christendom” (quoted in Kaizen, Issue 6 [pdf], featuring my interview with venture capitalist Kevin O’Connor).

For both Doriot and Morgan, character is fundamental. So what is good character? How does one acquire it, develop it, and make it second nature? How does one recognize it in others? How does one build institutions that support, nurture, and reward excellent character? That is a core part of business ethics.

And to make a plug for business and ethics here at Rockford College, the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship’s web log has a series of recent posts on patents and innovation, low-cost eye care in India, whether new jobs are most created in new or small businesses, and the psychic benefits of non-profit work.

Entrepreneur magazine mentions CEE

Entrepreneur magazine is a leading monthly in the field, and each year it has a feature on top colleges for entrepreneurship, along with a list of other colleges that offer entrepreneurship programs.

This year for the first time Rockford College and the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship are included.

Here is where Rockford College appears on Entrepreneur’s site. Here is their separate Rockford College information page. And here, finally, is a 2 mb PDF scan of the feature from the print version of the magazine.

Spring 2010 Philosophy courses

The line-up of Philosophy courses for the Spring 2010 semester is now available [pdf]. The list includes my courses and those being taught by my Philosophy colleagues Matthew Flamm and Shawn Klein, as well as a new cross-listed course being taught by our colleague Rafal Krazek of the French Department.

The spring semester will set a historical record for the most philosophy courses offered at Rockford College in one semester: Eleven. (Philosophy is a growth industry at RC!)

For more information, please go to Rockford College’s IQWeb site.

Kaizen issue 9 published

The latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with sports entrepreneur David Checketts. Checketts is former CEO of New York’s Madison Square Garden and is now chairman of SCP Worldwide, which owns the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake.

Kaizen also features a course-development project by Rockford College Professor Bill Lewis, a paper given by Professor Shawn Klein at a sports ethics conference, and an international conference organized and hosted by Professor J. J. Asongu.

A PDF version of Kaizen is available at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship’s Kaizen site, and the full interview with Mr. Checketts will be posted there soon.

If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.

CEE promotional video

The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship (CEE) was founded in 2007 at Rockford College. Its mission is excellence in teaching and research in Entrepreneurship, Business Ethics, and related fields. I’m the Executive Director, and in this fourteen-minute promo video, several of our faculty members, our academic dean (Dr. Stephanie Quinn), and I speak to CEE’s courses and mission. (And if fourteen minutes is too long, here is the three-minute trailer.)

The video can also be viewed at CEE’s website and at Yahoo! Video, as can the other thirty-four (so far) of the Center’s video interviews and other presentations.

Rockford, Illinois and the free society

Good news comes in triplets.

I learned last week that Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976) received an honorary doctorate from Rockford College and was our commencement speaker in 1969.

Then I heard that Gordon Tullock (co-founder of Public Choice economics with James Buchanan, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1986) is a native of Rockford.

And I was charmed recently to find this bookplate in the Rockford College library’s copy of Richard Cobden’s Political Writings. Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991.
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Dare I suggest it: Rockford, Illinois — intellectual center of the free world?