Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner was interviewed by the WSJ. The interview included an excerpt about the auto industry. I thought his comments on turnarounds was pretty interesting. He mentioned that when you're trying to turnaround a company you have to move quickly. You can't take a decade to slowly turn an organization around - you have to move with speed. He also comments on how important it is to deal with the culture change necessary to make that turnaround strategy really work (which is probably the most difficult thing to change in a company). The easy part is coming up with the strategy and knowing what to do. Getting it done and changing behavior is the hard part.
I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an
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