Dothan, Alabama, is one of our favorite Roadside MBA towns, and we enjoyed meeting Charlie Genthner and Lyle Peluso Jr almost as much as we enjoyed our tourist stop at the Peanut Monument. Scott Schaefer recently talked to the Dothan Eagle about our visit and Roadside MBA. Quick quote: “Dothan was one of our absolute favorite stops,” Schaefer said during a recent phone interview. The business professors loved the city's hospitality and openness, the roadside peanut statues and the ingenuity of the businessmen they profiled. … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2014
Mazzeo on Bloomberg/Sirius XM “Taking Stock”
Mike Mazzeo appeared live on the Bloomberg/Sirius XM radio show "Taking Stock" with Pimm Fox last week. Bloomberg has been kind enough to let us distribute the audio, which you can listen to here: [audio:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32791369/0612%20mike%20mazzeo%20Taking%20Stock%20Bloomberg.Sirius%20intv.mp3] © 2014 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission. … [Read more...]
Schaefer on Small Business Advocate
Scott Schaefer, the resident non-morning person here at Roadside MBA, joined host Jim Blasingame on the Small Business Advocate radio show last Friday morning --- which aired live at 7 am eastern! Scott was mostly coherent --- but decide for yourself by listening here --- and enjoyed chatting with Jim about applications of MBA ideas for small business. … [Read more...]
Oyer on Bloomberg Businessweek
Check out Paul Oyer's latest Roadside MBA piece; this one is for Bloomberg Businessweek's MBA Channel. Paul writes: Over the past four years, I and two fellow economists and business school professors, Michael Mazzeo and Scott Schaefer, have taken that approach on the road, looking for big lessons from unlikely sources. Instead of exploring the global economy’s businesses through case studies, we sought the nexus of the academic and the practical by visiting small business owners all over the country and simply asking them how they run their companies. … [Read more...]
800-CEORead: “Roadside MBA is rooted in everyday economic reasoning”
A brand new review of Roadside MBA by Jack Covert on the 800-CEORead blog! A quick quote: And so, when it comes to making the strategic decision about whether you should pick up Roadside MBA, I would say: “It depends… do you want to be successful?” You can read the entire review here. … [Read more...]
Stanford GSB: Roadside MBA Excerpt
Our discussion of CollegeFrog --- complete with accounting jokes --- is now excerpted on the Stanford GSB's web site. On one trip, we traveled to Pensacola, a fast-growing city on the western edge of the Florida Panhandle, to visit the leadership team of CollegeFrog, a tech startup trying to transform college recruitment and hiring in the stodgy world of accounting. We found this visit to be particularly enjoyable because it allowed us to make accountant jokes. Accountants are the only group who make economists seem exciting, so we have to take our shots when we can. … [Read more...]
Oyer Chats with Geoffrey James on Inc.com
Paul Oyer recently spoke to author and business blogger Geoffrey James about how small business can take on the big boys. Here's a snip of Geoffrey's column: Large firms expend a lot of time and effort trying to align the personal goals of management and employees with overarching corporate goals. By contrast, small business owners automatically have incentives that are perfectly aligned with the company's goals. As such, the entrepreneur can provide better on-site management at a lower cost. … [Read more...]
On @FortuneMag: “What Small Businesses Do Better Than Corporate America”
Fortune.com just posted our article "What Small Businesses Do Better Than Corporate America." An excerpt: We learned that small businesses thrive by taking on activities that big businesses aren’t good at... Size makes many important business activities easier, and big companies dominate the market segments where these size-advantaged activities are especially valuable. However, size makes other valuable activities harder, and smart entrepreneurs can drive a wedge into these big-business cracks to create profitable markets for small business. … [Read more...]
Financial Times Review: “An excellent primer on dealing with problems that keep managers… awake at night”
Our latest review is in the Financial Times: Two of the best chapters address the people factor. The interviewees share a variety of methods for discouraging the wrong applicants and hiring the right ones.... A bad dinner and a debate on whether to stiff the waitress on the tip forms a neat introduction to the issue of pay incentives. Read it here! … [Read more...]
Mazzeo on Kellogg Insight (with Podcast!)
Check out Mike Mazzeo's interview and podcast with Kellogg Insight: A lot of people have this preconceived notion that there’s a right answer—that if companies only followed a particular recipe they would be successful. We reject that idea and really feel the right thing to do, in any specific situation, depends on the context. So what we’ve nicknamed Mazzeo’s Law states that the right answer to every strategic question is, “It depends.” … [Read more...]