Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise at Oklahoma State University

Dilbert Creator Teaches Spot-On Lesson on Entrepreneurship without Mentioning the “E” Word   I have a PhD in entrepreneurship and I teach entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. A couple days ago, I heard a podcast by Scott Adams , the creator of Dilbert. The podcast (which is also available on YouTube ) included a 10-minute mini-lesson on how to increase your likelihood of benefitting from ‘luck’. Although Adams’ lesson never mentioned the words ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘entrepreneurship’, it represents one of the best succinct how-to lessons on the topic of entrepreneurship I’ve ever heard. Here’s a quick summary of the lesson. You can increase your ‘luck’ (which I translate to “increase your chances of becoming a successful entrepreneur”) by Having a positive attitude, expecting luck to happen in your favor. Going wherever the energy level is the highest (both in terms of geography and industry). Networking – meeting as many people as you can and keep...

A Risk-Management Approach to Defeating SARS-CoV2 and COVID-19   In 1921, Professor Frank Knight (an economist at the University of Chicago) published his most famous work, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit , where he differentiated ‘risk’ (comprising the realm of future unknowns that depend “on the future being like the past”) from ‘true uncertainty’ (those situations where the future is not just unknown, but truly unknowable , because of an extreme lack of similarity with any relevant prior cases).  As such, he quipped that [true uncertainty occupies that space where] opinions (and not scientific knowledge) actually guide most of our conduct (p. 233).  Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a global pandemic that resides much closer to the realm of true uncertainty than risk, giving rise to myriads of ‘opinions’ but scant ‘scientific knowledge’ that is truly actionable.  Six weeks ago, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Surge...