The exceptionally entrepreneurial society

Arnold King of the Cato Institute has an interesting thought piece here on The Exceptionally Entrepreneurial Society.

Engineering podcast search engine

Rich Hoeg's eContent has a post about an Engineering Podcast Search engine created with Google Co-Op here. The engine can be accessed here.

Take the Guy Kawasaki venture capital aptitude test

here.

Better coverage at Stanford

My entrepreneurial activities get better coverage at Stanford than they do at Illinois (see here). Tom Byers and the gang at STVP run a heckuva program.

The entrepreneurial pendulum

Rebelutionary has an interesting post (here) about the entrepreneurial pendulum or that swing in moods felt by the entrepreneur as he/she approaches the market, alternately believing him/herself to be an idiot or G-d's gift to commerce.

And speaking about ideas

And speaking about ideas Landing the Deal has a post (here) about a site called springwise.com whose slogan is your daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas. Check out today's ideas here.

Will Rob Smith get Roundtuit?

I forgot about Rob Smith's clever blog Roundtuit for ideas that others might get roundtuit if you don't. He was commenting about the Rotter-Covey square and mentioned a time management system idea he had blogged about earlier (see here for comment and here for link). I've also linked roundtuit to the permanent links of this blog (and here). Not a bad source of freebie ideas for the entrepreneurial engineer.

Rotter, Covey, and the urgency-importance square

In The Entrepreneurial Engineer I talk about Julian Rotter's work on the distinction between those with internal versus external motivation. In Stephen Covey's famous book, he talks about the distinction between matters that are urgent versus those that are important.

The connection between these two authors is this. Matters that are urgent are important to someone other than you (externally motivated) and matters that are important get their importance because they are consistent with your internal motivation and goals. Saying this out loud helps highlight the point Covey was making and helps us name the quadrants of his famous urgency-importance square. Here in deference to Rotter's earlier work, we call the diagram the Rotter-Covey Square and name the four quadrants something other than I, II, II, and IV.

The upper right quadrant, called the do-it quadrant, concerns matters that important to you and others. There can be little question that these are matters of the highest priority.

The lower right quadrant, called the strategic maximization quadrant, conerns matters that are important to you, but not urgent for others. This, as Covey points out, is an oft-neglected quadrant, but one that should not be neglected. Thus, it is strategically important to rearrangea life to try to maximize time in this quadrant through long-term rearrangment of affairs so that more time can be spent on matters important to you.

The upper right quadrant, called the strategic minimization quadrant, concerns matters that are urgent for others, but not that important to you. Covey points out that for most of us this quadrant can be the dominant quad in our lives. We call it the quad of strategic minimization because it is important to a happy life to try to minimize time spent here through choosing work that gives us a steady dosage of activities that are important to us and others as well as time to do things that are simply important to us alone.

The lower right quadrant, called the tactical elimination quadrant, is the quad of busy work, work that isn't important to us or others. The best approach here is to just say "no" and tactically eliminate the time spent on items that no one cares about.

Rotter's distinction between internal and external motivations is an important one, and doing as Covey suggests by relating those to activities and how time is spent can lead to more time, better spent, on more meaningful activities.

Genetic algorithms used for stock picking

See my post on the latest hoopla of using genetic algorithms to pick stocks here.

Business hatcheries

Jeff Cornwall has a nice post over at The Entrepreneurial Mind about student business hatcheries at Belmont University.

For those students who have their own businesses we offer our student business hatcheries. The three hatcheries on our campus offer student entrepreneurs access to basic business infrastructure (desks, computers, phones, faxes, copier, etc.) on a co-op basis and to a variety of educational opportunities tied directly to their personal entrepreneurial experiences. Faculty, entrepreneur mentors, our accounting faculty, and local attorneys provide support and advice for students participating in this program.

See the full post here with pictures.