Entrepreneurship – Page 160 – artdiamondblog.com

“No Street Protester Has Yet Endowed a University Department”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Over the next three decades, Breasted would excavate a series of sites in Egypt, the Sudan and the Near East. He would also develop an important ability to identify rich and influential benefactors and to gain their confidence without resorting to sycophancy. . . . Notable among the Maecenas figures he cultivated was John D. Rockefeller.

Rockefeller had been an early patron of the University of Chicago; he might have done something for Near Eastern studies in any case, but it is clear that without Breasted’s energy and enthusiasm, Rockefeller’s scholarly philanthropy would never have taken the course it did. Eventually, he provided the funding for an entire Oriental Institute in 1931. (The OI, as it is affectionately known, had existed from 1919 but essentially as a concept between academic committees.) Together with its Egyptian offshoot, Chicago House, the OI is perhaps the leading center of Egyptology and Assyriology in the world. At the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are hearing a lot about the evils of bankers and capitalism, but as far as I know no street protester has yet endowed a university department.

For the full review, see:
JOHN RAY. “BOOKSHELF; From Illinois To Mesopotamia; Excavating sites in Egypt and the Near East, writing groundbreaking books and developing a talent for courting wealthy donors.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 23, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book under review:
Abt, Jeffrey. American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Lasseter’s Epiphany: “This Is What Walt Was Waiting For”

(p. 52) In a trailer on the Disney lot, Lasseter huddled with Rees and Kroyer to look at the first computer-generated scene to come in–a race among drivers in virtual motorcycles known as light cycles. The scene had no character animation and its graphics were rudimentary, but it brought Lasseter an epiphany. The dimensionality of the scene was something he had never witnessed before. If this technology could be melded with Disney animation, he thought, he would have the makings of a revolution. Until then, three-dimensional effects in animation had required difficult, costly sessions with the multistory “multiplane” camera, practical for only a few key sequences in a film, if that. The computers could even move the audience’s point of view around a scene like a Steadicam. The possibilities seemed infinite.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said later. “Walt Disney, all his career, all his life, was striving to get more dimension in his (p. 53) animation . . . and I was standing there, looking at it, going, ‘This is what Walt was waiting for.'”
He was not able to interest the animation executives in it; they did not care to hear about new technology unless it made animation faster or cheaper.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Funding Was Scarce to Develop Computer Graphics

(p. 29) As in Catmull’s graduate school days, however, the Walt Disney Co. was not interested in computer graphics. Walt had died of cancer in 1966, and the company was now run by a caretaker chief executive, Esmond Cardon “Card” Walker. Some of Disney’s technology experts saw great promise in the NYIT group’s work, but that was as far as it ever went.
Who else had pockets deep enough to support a major research effort into computer animation for filmmaking? It might take a decade, or even longer, before computer costs came down enough for (p. 30) a feature film to be anywhere near the realm of possibility. The only option, it seemed, was to keep making progress on the technical issues–on NYIT’s dime–while waiting for Disney to call.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Successful Innovation Depends More on Will than on Intellect

(p. 9) The odysseys of [Lasseter, Catmull, Smith and Jobs], and of Pixar as a whole, bring to mind the observation of the maverick economist Joseph Schumpeter that successful innovation “is a feat not of intellect, but of will.” Writing about the psychology of entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century, a rime when the subject was unfashionable, he believed few individuals are prepared for “the resistances and uncertainties incident to doing what has not been done before.” Those who braved the risks of failure did so out of noneconomic as well as economic motives, among them “the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.” In Pixar’s case, at least, the resistances and uncertainties were abundant–as was the will.

Carnegie and Twain Opposed Roosevelt’s Imperialism

Source of book image: http://www.chinarhyming.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/51Hr-aIgESL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Marxists and others on the left often claim that big business is the main force behind U.S. imperialism. Is it not ironic that the most imperialistic U.S. President was the anti-big-business “progressive” Teddy Roosevelt who was vehemently opposed by big businessman Andrew Carnegie?
Mark Twain is sometimes accused of insufficient sympathy with the downtrodden. Those who so accuse, misunderstand his message. He too opposed Roosevelt’s war on the Filipinos.
(Carnegie and Twain’s friendship is discussed in David Nasaw’s biography of Carnegie.)

(p. 13) There was within the United States a strong and vocal anti-imperialist movement, which included former President Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, but it struggled to tamp down the country’s growing expansionist zeal, and to compete with the energy, tenacity and bulldog ambition of one man in particular: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who in just six years rose meteorically from New York City police commissioner to president, nurtured a deep and unshakable contempt for what he called the “unintelligent, cowardly chatter for ‘peace at any price.’ ” Not only had the “clamor of the peace faction” left him unmoved, Roosevelt wrote, it had served to strengthen his conviction that “this country needs a war.”
. . .
Although Roosevelt moves in and out of Jones’s narrative, disappearing for long stretches, he still manages to steal the spotlight, just as he does in every book in which he appears. When McKinley dragged his feet before sending troops to Cuba, Roosevelt sneered that the president had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” In the Department of the Navy, Roosevelt gleefully took over while his boss was on summer vacation, anointing himself the “hot weather secretary” and crowing to a friend that he was having “immense fun running the Navy.” In Cuba, after choosing his regiment of Rough Riders from 23,000 applicants, he ordered his famous charge up Kettle Hill wearing a custom-made fawn-colored Brooks Brothers uniform with canary-yellow trim.

For the full review, see:
CANDICE MILLARD. “Looking for a Fight; At the Turn of the 20th Century, Theodore Roosevelt Set Out to Transform the United States into a Major World Power.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 19, 2012): 13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2012 and has the title “Looking for a Fight; A New History of the Philippine-American War.”)

The book under review is:
Jones, Gregg. Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream. New York: New American Library, 2012.

The Nasaw book on Carnegie mentioned in my initial comments is:
Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
(Note: the pagination of the hardback and paperback editions of Nasaw’s book are the same.)

How Pixar Vision Was Made Real

(p. 8) . . . Pixar’s story was anything but preordained. It is a triple helix of artistic, technological, and business struggles, and it is a study in the tremendously uncertain and contingent nature of artistic, technological, and business success. It illustrates how professional prestige and social status flow into each other, and how a small organization can magnify its power by deploying them as an economic force. It shows how small things, done well, can lead to big things. It is the story of a small group of individuals who started with a shared ambition to create a new way of telling stories–within a virtual world of mathematical constructions–and who traveled a long and circuitous road until their vision became a reality.

Manifesto for a Rising Standard of Living

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Mr. Diamandis is the chairman and chief executive of the X Prize Foundation and the founder of more than a dozen high-tech companies. With his journalist co-author, he has produced a manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions addressing the world’s most pressing concerns: overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom. The authors suggest that “humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation where technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standard of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.”
. . .
Predictions of a rosy future have a way of sounding as unrealistic as end-is-nigh forecasts. But Messrs. Diamandis and Kotler are not just dreamers. They lay out a plausible road map, discussing, among other things, the benefits of do-it-yourself tinkering–like the work by geneticist J. Craig Venter in beating the U.S. government in the race to sequence the human genome–and the growing willingness of techno-philanthropists like Bill Gates to tackle real-world problems.
The biggest hurdles, however, are not scientific or technological but political. There are still too many corrupt dictators and backward-looking governments keeping millions in penury. But as we have seen lately, the misruled have a way of throwing off despotic governments. With ever more people reaching for freedom, countless millions are tacitly embracing the Diamandis motto: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL SHERMER. “BOOKSHELF; Defying the Doomsayers; Abundance” argues that growing technologies have the potential not only to spread information but to solve some of humanity’s most vexing problems.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., FEBRUARY 22, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book being reviewed is:
Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012.

“The Government Is a Crappy Venture Capitalist”

(p. A13) Like the mythical monster Hydra–who grew two heads every time Hercules cut one off–President Obama, in both his State of the Union address and his new budget, has defiantly doubled down on his brand of industrial policy, the usually ill-advised attempt by governments to promote particular industries, companies and technologies at the expense of broad, evenhanded competition.
Despite his record of picking losers–witness the failed “clean energy” projects Solyndra, Ener1 and Beacon Power–Mr. Obama appears determined to continue pushing his brew of federal spending, regulations, mandates, special waivers, loan guarantees, subsidies and tax breaks for companies he deems worthy.
Favoring key constituencies with taxpayer money appeals to politicians, who can claim to be helping the overall economy, but it usually does far more harm than good. It crowds out valuable competing investment efforts financed by private investors, and it warps decisions by bureaucratic diktats susceptible to political cronyism. Former Obama adviser Larry Summers echoed most economists’ view when he warned the administration against federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that “the government is a crappy venture capitalist.”

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL J. BOSKIN. “OPINION; Washington’s Knack for Picking Losers; Former Obama adviser Larry Summers warned the administration against federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that ‘the government is a crappy venture capitalist’.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., FEBRUARY 15, 2012): A13.

“The Patience of Jobs”

(p. 7) Steve Jobs was missing from the scene of the meeting, though he would soon be Disney’s largest individual shareholder (the acquisition was a stock-for-stock trade) and the newest member of Disney’s board. Lasseter was right about his money; Jobs had driven a hard bargain in buying Lucas’s Computer Division for five million dollars (not ten million, as is sometimes reported), but as it turned out, he put ten times that amount into the company over the course of a decade to keep it afloat. Few other investors would have had the patience of Jobs.

Nasar Gives Compelling Portrait of Joseph Schumpeter and His Vienna

Source of book image: http://luxuryreading.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/grand-pursuit.jpg

(p. C31) Ms. Nasar gives us Belle Époque Vienna — infatuated with modernity and challenging London in the race to electrify with new telephone service, state-of-the-art factories and power-driven trams — and then a devastating picture of Vienna at the end of World War I: war veterans loitering outside restaurants waiting for scraps, and desperate members of a middle class that saw inflation wipe out all its savings trading a piano for a sack of flour, a gold watch chain for a few sacks of potatoes.
. . .
Among the more compelling portraits in this volume is that of Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the brilliant European economist who argued that the distinctive feature of capitalism was “incessant innovation” — a “perennial gale of creative destruction” — and who identified the entrepreneur as the visionary who could “revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention” or “an untried technological possibility.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Economist’s Progress: Better Living Through Fiscal Chemistry.” The New York Times (Fri., December 2, 2011): C31.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 1, 2011.)

Economic Freedom and Growth Depend on Protecting the Right to Rise

(p. A19) Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: “The right to rise.”
Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn’t seem like something we should have to protect.
But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.
That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. . . .
. . .
But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.
. . .
. . . , we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

For the full commentary, see:
JEB BUSH. “OPINION; Capitalism and the Right to Rise; In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 19, 2011): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)