Hi all, and welcome to our very first post on the Roadside MBA blog!
We are in the process of preparing our sixth Roadside MBA tour. We’ve gotten a little better at our trips each time, and I think our big innovation on this one will be weather. You see, the last time we took in a trip in January we traveled from Denver to Oklahoma City, visiting smaller cities in Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma along the way. Average high temps were in the single digits, which was difficult on Paul, him being a Californian and all.
So, this time we are headed south! The three of us (myself, Mike Mazzeo from Kellogg, and Paul Oyer from Stanford) are meeting in Atlanta on Sunday, January 27, and returning home from New Orleans on Thursday the 31st. I’ve attached a rough map of our route, and you can see that we’ll be sticking pretty close to the Gulf Coast. Should be 72 in Pensacola on Tuesday!
Per usual, we’ll be visiting with owners and managers of small- and medium-sized businesses all along the way, asking them questions about how they run their businesses, and looking for examples we can use to translate MBA strategy frameworks to the small business context. If you haven’t yet heard much about our project, here’s an old blog post of mine that describes how the Roadside MBA project got started, what we’re doing, and why.
Oh, and another innovation (on top of the warmer weather, and the snazzy logo) is that we’ll be blogging it up along the way. We’re going to try to discuss ideas about business in our posts, but you might have to forgive us if we include a travel snapshot or two. (Dothan, AL bills itself the Peanut Capital of the World, and I imagine we’ll have some impressions to share…)
So, we invite you to come on along, in a virtual sense, as business professors tour the southeast to learn more about small business.
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