SOPHISTICATED FINANCE

Afghanistan Helicopter Heroics

I have had some experience with helicopters in operations with the Coast Guard Auxiliary. The CG pilots can do amazing things with their helos, but the photo below takes amazing to a new level.

This photo of a helo rescue mission was taken by a soldier in Afghanistan . The pilot is a Pennsylvania National Guardsman who flies EMS choppers in civilian life. How many people on the planet could set the back end of a helo down on the roof of a shack, on a steep mountain cliff, and hold it there while soldiers load wounded men in the rear.

God Bless America!

"Social Entrepreneurship" Confuses the Issue

I have been involved in a well known non-profit project for the last 120 days. This is a project with a recognition level similar to Save the Children. I have learned a few lessons, which are listed below.

1. Everybody will take a meeting with a representative of a well known non-profit
2. To become a well known non-profit, in large part it is all about who the spokesman/leader is
3. You must have an audacious goal which changes the way people think about the problem
4. Many people involved in the project have different objectives and different sets of principles for decision making
5. There should be no difference in the project whether you sell cups with the project logo or sell a product with a contribution margin as the means to fund raise for the cause, provided the financial contribution is reinvested in the project and does not conflict with achieving the mission

Most of these "lessons" are the same findings in determining a successful startup. Entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship whether you are a non-profit or the next Google. What the non-profits need to do is think more like entrepreneurs. What more entrepreneurs need to do is to recognize that social objectives are consistent with profit making companies.

I think over time the distinction some people draw between social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship will go away. The distinction does nothing to contribute to understanding. Evidence that the distinction is going away comes from Atlanta-based Better World Books, a VC-backed company with an explicit commitment to a social project (illiteracy reduction) and a defined financial commitment to support that goal. However, to achieve the overall objectives the company is a for profit company. More people should be considering the Better World Books model. Then we can stop talking about "social" entrepreneurship and have more time to solve the world's problems.

Previous thoughts on "social" entrepreneurship are here.

Image credit: echoinggreen.org

Decision Making and the Smart Man

Back in March I posted on the role of assumptions in developing the business and financial model. The important point was that the assumptions represent the key risks in the business model. Yesterday I read a good post on recruiting in the Private Equity and Venture Capital Recruitment blog. In the post the author suggested that one should trust their intuition and check their assumptions. The key point was that your intuition is frequently a better indicator than a rigid checklist approach.

My definition of intuition is " facts that you cannot articulate". Therefore, when you rely on intuition there are a series of facts and certain assumptions which logically lead to the conclusion--the intuition. I have on many occasions worked with highly intuitive people. Frequently I have been able to put togeher the facts and assumptions that led to the intuition. There are two points here.

1. For most intuitions the facts can be discovered, if you work at it--perhaps with another person
2. The assumptions in the intuition represent the risks in the decision or conclusion

I do not use intuition much and never have, but I have great respect for intuitive people. However, I always take the time to construct the facts and the assumptions in an intuition in order to identify the risks or the errors in logic.

Another technique I always use is the "smart man" hypothesis. Whenever, you are trying to understand something like an intuition, assume the person is very smart. By assuming they are very smart, you force yourself to find the facts and the assumptions that would logically lead to the smart man's conclusion. Dismissing something as "woman's intuition" or "off the wall" usually means that you were not willing to put in the effort to understand how a smart man would have arrived at the conclusion.

Note: I learned about the smart man hypothesis back in the early 1980s. It has served me especially well in better understanding many, many people and their thinking. I am sure it has been renamed to be more gender neutral but I do not know the new term.

Mission

In entrepreneurship and in corporate America much is made of the “mission” of the firm. The mission explains the corporate focus and principal objective of the firm. Unfortunately, the mission statement is frequently written and then ignored. Equally problematic is the executive who puts his personal ambition and recognition ahead of the mission.

An excellent example of people who understand mission are the guards at the Tomb of the Unkown Soldier in Washington, DC. This story was sent to me by several people today, the anniversary of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

In 2003 as Hurricane Isabelle was approaching Washington , DC , our 
US Senate/House took 2 days off in anticipation of the storm. On the ABC evening news, it was reported that because of the dangers from the hurricane, the military members assigned the 
duty of guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were given permission to suspend the assignment.

They respectfully declined the offer, 'No way, Sir!' Soaked to the skin, marching in the pelting rain of a tropical storm, they said that guarding 
the Tomb was not just an assignment, it was the highest honor that can be 
afforded to a service person. The tomb has been patrolled continuously, 24/7, since 1930.

Mercosur Trip

Next weekend (December 5) I will be leaving for a trip to Monteveideo, Uruguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina. I will be attending a conference in Uruguay and then visiting client prospects in BA.

I am especially looking forward to my first trip to BA. BA is one of about seven cities that I have left on my list of places to see. The others are Istanbul, Athens, Rio, Johannesburg, Moscow and Cairo. Most of the rest of the world's great cities I have visited.

Would appreciate reader thoughts on places to visit in BA  and especially restaurants to eat at. Please leave your ideas in the  comments.

Would be happy to meet with SF readers in Paraguay and Argentina. Send me a tweet (@rhhfla) or email me.

Blogging should continue uninterrupted that week, but post topics could be even more eclectic than usual. Will try to restrain myself and avoid five posts on economic development :)

Image credit

Thanksgiving

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

For each new morning with its light

For rest and shelter of the night

For health and food, for love and friends

For everything Thy goodness sends.

For more quotations on graditude, try Quote Garden

To everybody in harms way, be safe this Thanksgiving.

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So Many People Interested in George Polya

Many people say that successful blogs stay on subject. Long time readers of SF will know that I cannot abide this rule. I often post on academic papers that interest me and other somewhat eclectic subjects. A recent example would be the post on George Polya. Much to my surprise this off topic post has brought hundreds of people to my blog through Google searches. If you would like to learn more about the ever popular George Polya, who has to be one of the funniest great thinkers in history, read Gerald L. Alexanderson's The Random Walks of George Polya.

(Polya is credited with first using the term "random walk", a popular concept in finance and statistics.)

If you care to understand why I read and write about mathematics and mathematicians, let me explain.

• All finance is now basically derivatives; derivatives are all about statistics and math
• Strategy is not understood until it is reduced to numbers (Lord Kelvin and Hacker)
• Technology starts with basic science, which is again almost all mathematics today

Last eclectic topic for today, again off point. If someone is looking for an interesting Ph.D thesis I think it would a fascinating and valuable study to show the inter-relationships between the thinking of Polya, Piaget and Papert. Seymour Papert was a renown MIT professor who combined the teachings of both Polya and Piaget to define a new concept of education for children using computers. (These concepts are the educational foundation for OLPC.) The thesis might be suitable for artificial intelligence, psychology, education, computer science or maybe even philosophy students.

Miami, FL

 

Webinar: How to Develop the Business Concept

I will be doing a webinar through the Pino Entrepreneurship Center at FIU tomorrow, 10-NOV, at 11am. Details are here. The webinar covers my five step process to develop a business concept and focuses on understanding the customer need and building the business model. To get a feel for my approach, this post would be informative.

The Discipline of Writing

Will Price is a blogger who I like very much. In a post today he references a quote from William Faulkner, which is below.

"Faulker said, "I don't know what I think until I read what I said." That's not just a joke. You learn what you think by codifying your thinking in some way. Codifying one's thinking is an important step in inventing oneself. The most difficult way to do it is by thinking about thinking  - it helps to speak or write your thoughts. Writing is the most profound way of codifying your thoughts, the best way of learning from yourself who you are and what you believe."

Will goes on to expand upon this quote in the context of blogging, but I think it also directly relates to my post The Discipline of Elegance and Simplicity.

Clear and measured writing requires a discipline to distill the complex into a more understandable form. In fact, I would go so far as to say that people who do not write well usually have not, in part, thought something through completely. If you are not using writing as a means to refine your thinking, you are missing out on a valuable tool.

To improve your writing (so you have fewer excuses not to use the technique), Elements of Style is a classic instructional text. It was written in 1918 and is still widely used in colleges and universities. It is only about 100 pages, so it is an easy read.

Mac Tips

I am a big advocate of keyboard commands rather than using a mouse or clicking on tabs. One of the all time most popular posts here was Excel Keyboard Shortcuts. I like keyboard commands because they are much faster than the alternatives. I am not a productivity maven, but keyboard shortcuts must improve ones productivity, if that is an issue you need to address.

Through @JanieC I founded a great Mac blog called Minimal MAC which lead to my discovery of LaunchBar. LaunchBar is so good that it challenges one to describe it and do it justice. Suffice it to say, it enables one to launch any file, program, web page, bookmark or application with keyboard shortcuts and I swear launch times are faster than native Mac. What makes all this possible is a search engine and file indexing system that puts Finder to shame. The program also makes the use of Spaces or icons in the Dock unnecessary because LaunchBar is a faster and easier way to find open apps or files. LB also is a terrific way to do command line prompts, which I will admit I was never able to find on my Mac before LaunchBar. LaunchBar costs about $48 but time savings will pay for it quickly.

To all my readers who are old hands at Mac and have already found LaunchBar, my apologies. While I thought my blogging would decrease this week while I was in Asia, I failed to take into account jet lag-- which provided additional periods for writing in lieu of sleeping.

not Miami, FL

George Polya--Problem Solving and Heuristics

I have been re-reading Seymour Papert's Mindstorms, perhaps the seminal work on the use of computers in children's education. Papert trained originally as a mathematician, which heavily influenced his thinking on the use of computers in education. Papert states in the book that much of his thinking was influenced by another famous mathematician, George Polya. Polya is famous for his thinking on problem solving and heuristics in mathematics. Naturally I had to start reading about Polya. Polya's writings helped me to resolve two questions about myself that have troubled me for over thirty years:

1. Why is it that I can listen to a company problem and come up with an excellent new strategy in 5-10 minutes; I see my ability to develop strategies as somewhat akin to the way some people can do bar tricks.
2. Why is it that I can solve certain kinds of problems but I can not solve large, complex conceptual problems; I appear to specialize in solving concrete problems that are suitable for a zen like approach--focused and simple.

The answer to the first question comes from a quote from George Polya:

"In order to solve this differential equation you look at it till a solution occurs to you."

If Polya can just look at a math problem and solve it, why can I not just look at a business problem and develop a new strategy. While solving differential equations may be a different kind of problem from developing a business strategy, I think both Polya and I have developed heuristics. In the case at least of Polya, the heuristics are quite profound in their own right. This recognition of the role of heuristics gives me additional motivation to clarify my thinking on my formal concept of business model, which is clearly an heuristic. (My original thinking on business model is here.)

The second question was answered by a description of Polya in The Random Walks of George Polya by Gerald L. Alexanderson:

"It was not given to him to solve very difficult problems or to build vast conceptual structures. Yet he could perceive the significance, the beauty, and the promise of a rather concrete, not too large problem, forsee the possibility of a solution, and work at it with intensity. And, when he had found the solution, he kept on working at it with loving care, till each detail became fully intuitive and the connection of the details in a well-ordered whole fully transparent."

If a thinker as profound as Polya can have limitations in problem solving, so can I. Somebody else can solve the difficult conceptual problems.

If you are interested in problem solving, education or artificial intelligence, you should read both Papert and Polya. The applications to artificial intelligence will become apparent after you read the books. Papert also discusses epistemology in the context of learning, but Polya dismisses philosophy in this famous quote:

"I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between."

Now I am off to see if Polya ever wrote about Bertrand Russell or whether Godel's Proof, developed in thirty minutes (obviously using a heuristic) was sufficiently elegant to settle the matter. Godel, arguably the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, mathematically proved that the basic principle in Russel's Principia Mathematica--mathematics was grounded in logic --(therein lies the link to philosophy) was incorrect. (The other candidate for the greatest mathematician of the 20th century was John von Neumann, a student of Polya.)

If I had studied math with a teacher trained by Papert, maybe I would have pursued math instead of philosophy in college. One interesting thing is how Papert and Polya show that epistemology is perhaps the link between mathematics and philosophy :)

If you are wondering how any of this relates to management or finance, learn about heuristics for problem solving.

Image credit George Polya

Miami, FL

Best Posts--Technology

Wordle word cloud for Sophisticated Finance

Many experts on blogging say that one should periodically re-post best posts. I will resist the temptation to re-post all the Excel and model building posts which are becoming "classics" (based on number of readers and Google search rankings). Instead I will focus on the most popular technology posts, which follow.

1. Enterprise IT SEP-09
2. Pundits Wrong About Facebook FriendFeed Acquisition AUG-09
3. HP 12C iPhone App JUN-09
4. McKinsey on Twitter DEC-08
5. Will Facebook Survive the Future of the Internet DEC-08
6. Business Ideas for 13 Year Olds NOV-08
7. The Consequences of Technology Adoption APR-08
8. Microsoft Yahoo Makes Little Sense FEB-08

BOLD THINKING--CINCINNATI

Please feel free to send this post to 1000 of your closest friends living within 300 miles of Cincinnati, OH. Alternatively, you could rent a plane and thrown out hundreds of copies of this post anywhere in Ohio. Suitable pictures of you and the plane will be posted on SF.

Previous thoughts on Bold Thinking are here.

Entrepreneurship Weekend Workshop  CINCINNATI October 24 & 25 Which win do you want for YOUR company? Traditional Thinking Most workshops equip you with checklists and a on-size fits all approach.  The result - you leave all revved up to go, but after attending, what real changes or impact have you really been able to create?  BOLD Thinking A Bold Thinking Live! Workshop is framed in a context that reveals the vital decisions you, the entrepreneur, must make to achieve true advantage in your marketplace. We believe entrepreneurship is the essence of advantage. The Bold Thinking Live! Workshop Basics Value Creation Understanding your company concept on a deep value creation level and translating it into a value capturing business model that makes your company truly competitive. Value Capture Breaking down your business model into an actual and usable financial model that will reveal your company's true revenue drivers, hidden costs, and new opportunities in your market. Value Proposition Harnessing the power of the your company's marketing message so that you are selling benefits that your customers not only  understand and want, but will actually pay for. The Bold Thinking Live! Workshop Team Dr. Jeffrey Stamp, Bold Thinking Founder Dr. Stamp has brought together a nationally renowned team of entrepreneurial mentors with over 70 years of collected experience, both doing and teaching business.  Dr. Stamp himself is a world recognized author, professor, inventor, entrepreneur, and creative guru.  He has worked in over over 300 markets, holds multiple patents, and founded over seven companies.  Some of his innovations include: Baked Lays Potato Crisps, Merwin Business Simulation Model, OPERA Method for Discovery Thinking, Syllabets - Syllable-Based Reading Method, and many more. Robert Hacker, GH Capital Founder Robert Hacker is the founder of GH Capital Partners, headquartered in Miami, but serving clients worldwide. Through GH Capital he creates the strategies to grow large companies and raises the capital to support these strategies.  In addition strategy and funding, Hacker has also earned a reputation for his experience in the operational execution of strategies (much of it in emerging markets).He also teaches entrepreneurship at Florida International University and serves on the Board of the Pino Entrepreneurship Center at FIU. Much of his thinking and teaching material on business development can be found on his blog: Sophisticated Finance. Colleen Post, Bold Thinking Managing Partner Colleen Post has worked within the university education system for nearly ten years.  As part of the nationwide Kauffman Campus Initiative, she coached over 250 student business start-up teams and over 100 professional start-up teams.  Her background is a mix of business, theatre, generational dynamicsand perfecting the art of communication.  Many of her thoughts and 'tough love' advice for entrepreneurs can be found on her blog: Millennialland .  Elizabeth Edwards, InOneWeekend Founder  At Neyer Holdings, Elizabeth finds, evaluates, and funds start-up companies in the consumer and technology sectors.  Prior to Neyer Holdings, Elizabeth was a strategy consultant with the Strategy & Innovation group at Deloitte Consulting, focused on innovation, commercialization, and strategic marketing for Fortune 500 companies, mostly in the life sciences sector.  Elizabeth is also the founder of InOneWeekend and Cincinnati Innovates.Learn more about InOneWeekend, Cincinnati Innovates, and Elizabeth at her blog: InOneWeekend. The Bold Thinking Live! Workshop Details We take care of every detail - nutritious food and beverages available all day long, tools, materials, parking, and gourmet meals. Hosted at Cincinnati's newest innovation space: 538 Reading Road - Downtown Cincinnati Saturday, October 24 and Sunday, October 25 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Click here for more information or to register. Special Bonus: As our pioneer group in Cincinnati, you will also receive a full-year membership (a $750 value) to our Online Bold Thinking Institute.  This is our gift to you for making the decision to invest in yourself and your business. For more information, please visit our website: www.boldthinking.com or send us an e-mail: info@boldthinking.com

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Leadership

Drew Faust, President of Harvard University, recently made some remarks to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School. Amongst the topics, he spoke about leadership and the five essential elements that HBS must teach.

1. Developing judgment
2. Having an entrepreneurial perspective
3. Using good communication skills
4. Behaving with integrity
5. Having the courage to act

I find two essential elements missing from the list.

First, there is no concept of commitment to the mission--the over riding principle for which the organization is devoted. Examples of missions might be "defending the U.S.", "improving the lives of our customers", or maybe even "increasing shareholder value".

Second, there is no element of selflessness--putting the good of the team, the company or the country ahead of your personal ambitions.

When it comes to leadership, I prefer the way it is taught at West Point. I think bullets bring a clarity of thinking that the Harvard professors may be missing. For more on the West Point philosophy of leadership, read this post.

I found the story through this post.

Miami, FL

Ohio Entrepreneurship Workshop

I am taking my show on the road. I am joining the folks at Bold Thinking to do a two day advanced workshop on entrepreneurship in Cincinnati on October 24-25. The "advanced" workshop is for company founders who are already in business but are probably struggling with their growth strategy or value creation. Bold Thinking's approach is summarized in this quote:

"The most important tool that today’s entrepreneur must possess is the ability to make value sustaining decisions that directly relate to their enterprise’s ability to remain competitive.  The Bold Thinking methodology provides a proven framework for decision-making designed to enhance the creation of value and strengthen competitive advantage." 

The workshop will combine lectures with case studies to improve business owner decision making. Also, each attendee will be able to work one-on-one with each of the workshop presenters to refine their business model and value creation strategy.

Bold Thinking was founded by Dr. Jeff Stamp and Colleen Post. Jeff is a widely recognized expert on innovation and creativity. He has worked with companies such as Pepsi and American Express on new product development and consulted to large companies around the world. He has also started four or five companies. Colleen and I worked together at the Pino Entrepreneuraship Center at FIU and she was instrumental in encouraging me to develop my workshop series on business model and financial planning. Colleen's area of expertise is in helping companies understand how their customers see them, a valuable but rarely discussed subject.

For more information on the workshop, send an email to post@boldthinking.com or contact me.

Columbia Business School Website

Everyone follows the musings from a certain business school near Maine. My alma mater, Columbia, has a very nice site on current thinking in management and entrepreneurship called Columbia Business School Public Offering.

Under faculty blogs, the postings from Professor Rita Gunther McGraith are particularly interesting. The work covered in another faculty blog, Socializing Finance, is cutting edge and includes writings by Daniel Beunza, who I wrote about in April 2009. These and many other blogs can be found at the Columbia website.

Catherine New, the Editor of the site, was kind enough to add Sophisticated Finance under alumni blogs.

Social Entrepreneurship is Just Good Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is the application of entrepreneurial principles to address the deprivation of social rights. Social rights, in contrast with natural rights or legal rights, are the rights arising from a social compact and include health, education and employment or economic well being.

The notion that social entrepreneurship provides a social benefit and for profits do not is to misunderstand what makes great "for profit" companies. Great for profit companies are environmentally aware, create large amounts of new jobs (which frequently go to the disadvantaged--unemployed), encourage their employees to be active in community affairs, donate goods and services to those in need, do not kill, maim or cripple employees or people in the community in order to increase profits and generally make the world a better place. As Google says "do no harm"!

For example, when Wal-Mart opens a new store in rural Florida (or Guatemala, or Timbuktu) 300-500 people have jobs, the pride that goes with providing for their families, the options that come with income and a multiplier effect that benefits the whole community. This Wal-Mart opening addresses many of the same social deprivations as the social entrepreneur.

This semester in my entrepreneurship course there is a semester long project to develop a business model for an organization that teaches science to disadvantaged children in Miami. This organization is a classic example of social entrepreneurship. However, never once will I mention social entrepreneurship or "non-profit". I will, instead, stress that applying the principles of entrepreneurship is all that is necessary to make the science teaching organization an economically viable entity. By focusing on economic viability, we will achieve the larger objectives of the organization--the same objectives that should drive every company.

I have done several workshops related to non-profits. The more I think and study about the notion of social entrepreneurship, the more I think it is a meaningless distinction. Yes--it may make you feel good to say you are a "social entrepreneur", but stop stroking your ego and get back to making your organization economically viable so it can carry out its mission.

"Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. That institution will touch many people in its life: customers, investors, employees, and everyone they touch as well. I believe we have an obligation to ensure the resulting impact is worthy of the energies we invest in bringing it to life."

Eric Ries,Venture Advisor Kleiner Perkins

Enough said.

Miami, FL

McKinsey: Asia and Technology Innovation

The emergence of China and India as economic and political powers intrigues me. I have watched and studied Asia for almost thirty years and many of those years I lived there. Considering just the sheer scale of their populations, I think that the development of China and India are going to stress the global socio-economic system in ways which we barely comprehend.

Eric Drexler from McKinsey has a new article "Asia and the Elements of Innovation" that discusses the trends in Asia and their positive affects on innovation. Drexler cites three factors for innovation to flourish:

1. Drive--a culture that hungers for change
2. Human Capital--an education system that enables people to reach their full potential
3. Mobilization--a regulatory environment that fosters entrepreneurship

Drexler's analysis is correct but it overlooks an important factor--ideology. As I have discussed before, ideology is more than just a regulatory environment and includes cultural norms and political philosophy. In the 1980s every Japanese Nobel Prize winner lived and worked in the U.S. Japan is a full fledged democracy with a very modern society, but the culture, and more specifically the academic culture, drove away the most talented scientists. I think that ideology is the area in which China and India need to make the most progress, especially if they want to foster innovation. The burden that India has to overcome is probably its caste system and China probably must come to grips with Communism or dictatorship. The favorable environment that spawns innovation and the resultant improvement in the standard of living will create a dramatic clash with their current ideologies. How these clashes manifest themselves will create problems on a scale that we have probably not seen since WWII.

The development of China and India is inevitable, but this evolution is not just about expanding consumer markets, manufacturing outsourcing and innovation. In the end, ideology in China and India will be the key factor.

Image credit

Miami, FL

War is Not the Worst Thing

John Stuart Mill is arguably one of the greatest philosophers of all time. In the 19th century he wrote:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."

(Source: @majbc A Major's Perspective)

Former President Bush intentionally adopted a strategy to separate the U.S. population from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, largely only the families of those serving share the pain and suffering. Whether these wars were justified is not the question or an acceptable excuse to treat this war as an "outsourced" event. Without a draft and with most WW II veterans dying off and Vietnam veterans aging, little of the U.S. population understands war first hand. We may have become the nation John Stuart Mill describes in the quote above.

Oddly enough the U.S. military understands this point. Military strategists are very concerned that the U.S. population could not withstand a war if there were, for example, large domestic power outages for a period of six months. We might capitulate to get back our creature comforts. Remember only 100 Americans (the U.S. Senate) have to vote to surrender. 

I see many returning veterans now at FIU. Many of these veterans need extra help in many forms. Embrace them, support them and thank them. It's your chance to receive a little bit of understanding and find the courage to persevere.

CM

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Miami, FL

Upcoming FIU Workshop--Financial Plans

I am beginning my third year of presenting workshops for the Pino Entrepreneurship Center at FIU (where I teach). My most popular workshop is on preparing a financial plan for a business, which is being offered on August 13. The morning session is devoted to how to develop a business model and the afternoon focuses on how to integrate the business model into the financial plan. I will be using a new model for the afternoon session, which is a social media company. Details are here. The nominal fee goes to Pino.

I have also agreed to a workshop in the fall on "Accounting for the Non-financial Executive". Pino challenged me to see if I can come up with an entertaining and practical workshop. I will rise to the challenge!!--with a whole new repertoire of war stories and jokes. If you slept through accounting, can't read a balance sheet or just want to see me make accounting not be boring, stay tuned here. I will announce this historic event with plenty of notice.

I would also remind any student readers that I will be teaching HFT 4292C--Entrepreneurship--this fall. The course is a little theory, a lot of practical and a lifetime of stories and examples. The jokes are free.

Miami, FL