Is It Really Is Safe to Go Back In the Water?
Ever thought about opening your own business? Well, think again. If statistics are reliable, most businesses go out of business within their first decade (as high as 60% according to some reports). The turnover of storefronts from Hunt Avenue to Aspen during the past several years is enough to convince. Nevertheless, owning your own business >> Read More…
What Can You Do? What Can You Be?
In the 1990s in grad school, a friend of mine was working on a project to develop a non-monetary based measure for a nation’s well being. Many had long questioned GDP as an adequate measure of economic progress or quality of life. I lost touch with my friend, but retained my interest in hers and >> Read More…
Check, Please
Everything has a price and there’s no such thing as a free lunch (though the cost of a salad and blackberry lemonade – to go – at Wildflower Café is awfully reasonable). If you’ve ever wondered why things cost what they do, The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter explains. “Prices are everywhere.”Even if some >> Read More…
Why Did the Cannibal Move to Flagstaff?
FBN’s Business Book Review: Andy Kessler’s new book, Eat People and Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs reads like Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead – lite. Early in the book, we find him lunching with Republican activist George Gilder (identified in his Wikipedia entry as a “techno-utopia intellectual”). Gilder dispenses this advice: the more you waste, >> Read More…
Are Icelanders the New Polish?
Reykjavik, Iceland has much in common with Flagstaff. In preparation for a March trip, one visitor was told that almost everything was within a five-minute walk, but to dress warmly because of the snow. Add in a national financial crisis, unemployment, bank failures, home foreclosures, commitment to green living, and dramatic mountain landscapes and the >> Read More…
What if Kathleen Battle Were a Market Economy?
When it comes to the market (one is tempted to write The Market), we speak as if it is an entity with “a mind and a morality of its own,” writes Bernhard E. Harcourt in The Illusion of Free Markets. Philosophers call this a category mistake – that is talking about a thing in one >> Read More…
Get the Crayons Out and Get to Work
Do you want to be a “good corporate citizen,” occupy the “executive suite,” or go super-charged by taking an “extreme job” to earn the really big bucks? It’s no easy choice. On the extreme end of the spectrum are “over-achieving road warriors,” whose income ratchets them up the lifestyle scale of a champagne chaser. Not >> Read More…
New Speak in the Capitalist World?
Business Book Review by Constance Devereaux Shaking his fingers, face in a frown, a former professor always cautioned us to avoid the “sloppy thinking” evident in our “sloppy speaking.” He believed most people, students especially, were guilty of vague and ambiguous expressions in everyday speech, with negative consequences for thinking and decision-making. Over the past >> Read More…
Hopi Village Breaking Ground for New Prosperity
The concept of planned development has been in place in Sipaulovi for more than 30 years; the ideal location of houses, fields, ceremonial buildings, and public gathering places was laid out to maximize land use on Second Mesa. Planned commercial development, in Sipaulovi, or anywhere in Hopi, is a more recent idea, but a much >> Read More…
How Green is My Valet?
Most of our efforts will really never be seen by guests,” said Annika Jackson, vice president/managing director of Enchantment Resort in Sedona. One of three hotels (the other two are Sedona Rouge and Wyndham Sedona) certified “Green” by the Arizona Hotel and Lodging Association (AzHLA), Enchantment is part of an effort to create sustainably greener >> Read More…
