LA County Commissioner to Discuss Economic Development on Economic Perspectives December 7

Los Angeles County Commissioner Kenia Davalos will discuss economic development strategies for underserved communities on the December 7 edition of Economic Perspectives on KAZI 88.7 FM, 5:30 p.m. – 6 p.m. central time.  The interview can be listened to live online at http://www.live365.com/stations/kazifm?site=pro&play.  Davalos was one of the keynote speakers at the PeopleFund Conference on Economic Opportunity on October 24 in Austin, Texas.

Kenia Davalos

For more than 10 years, Davalos has worked within the private, non-profit, and government sectors as an advocate for the Latino business community. Her career includes distinguished tenures at the White House, U.S. Small Business Administration, Latino Issues Forum, The Greenlining Institute, American Express, and now the Los Angeles County as a 2nd term County Commissioner. With such distinctions as “Philanthropist of the Year” (2002) and “Advocate of the Year” (2004) by the Latino Business Association, Kenia’s professional life has been dedicated to empowering Hispanic business owners. In 2001, while serving as Market Development Manager for American Express, Davalos developed and promoted an innovative marketing strategy through which proceeds of the American Express Community Express/ Latin Business Association credit card were donated to non-profit organizations promoting small business development. Featured in various publications on both a national and international level, Davalos’ experience as entrepreneur, advocate, and elected official gives her a comprehensive perspective on the challenges of economic development in minority communities.

Getting Big Things Done in Government Focus of Dec 6 Book Review

The December 6 guest on KAZI Book Review is William Eggers, co-author of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Government.  Listen to the interview on KAZI 88.7 FM, 12:30 p.m. – 1 p.m. central time in Austin or live online at http://www.live365.com/stations/kazifm?site=pro&play.  Eggers’ book addresses the frustration of the American people with our government’s series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer.

It also covers the nation’s proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing.  Eggers believes we need more successes like these to reclaim government’s legacy of competence. In If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Eggers and his co-author John O’Leary explain how to do it. The key? Understand-and avoid-the common pitfalls that trip up public-sector leaders during the journey from idea to results.

The authors identify pitfalls including:

• The Partial Map Trap: Fumbling handoffs throughout project execution
• The Tolstoy Syndrome: Seeing only the possibilities you want to see
• Design-Free Design: Designing policies for passage through the legislature, not for implementation
• The Overconfidence Trap: Creating unrealistic budgets and timelines
• The Complacency Trap: Failing to recognize that a program needs change

Eggers is one of the country’s leading authorities on government reform. A global director for Deloitte Research and director of the Deloitte Public Leadership Institute, he is responsible for research and thought leadership for Deloitte’s public sector industry practice.

He is a former manager of the Texas Performance Review and director of e-Texas. He has advised governments around the world and his commentary has appeared in dozens of major media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune.

November 30 Interview with Maggie Anderson on Supporting Black Business Postponed

The November 30 Economic Perspectives interview with Maggie Anderson, CEO of the Empowerment Experiment, has been postponed to late December or early January.

November 30 Economic Perspectives Focus on Black Business and Business History

Maggie Anderson, co-founder and CEO of the Empowerment Experiment will be the guest on the first half of Economic Perpsectives on November 30, 5:30 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. on KAZI 88.7 FM in Austin.  Listen live online at http://www.live365.com/stations/kazifm?site=pro&play.  The Empowerment Experiment, based in Chicago,  is an initiative by Maggie and her husband John Anderson to buy products and services from only Black-owned businesses for one year.

Maggie Anderson

“The Empowerment Experiment exists because we are not doing enough as a community to support Black business.,” says Anderson.  “The plight and potential of Black entrepreneurs and professionals are virtually absent from the national dialogue. We believe they are key to creating and stimulating long–term wealth in Black communities.”

Maggie is an accomplished strategy professional with twelve years of legal, research, communications and business strategy experience. With a JD and an MBA from the University of Chicago, and as a former Strategy Manager and Speechwriter for C-suite executives at McDonald’s, Maggie is a respected leader in the Chicago business community. Previously, at McDonald’s corporate headquarters, she developed, presented, and implemented influential growth strategies and venture plans in the areas of diversity, emergent industries and global markets, market segmentation, communications, business intelligence, and corporate responsibility.

The guest on the second half  of Economic Perspectives will be Gary Hoover, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.  Hoover is leading a lecture series, The Story of Enterprise: Lessons for Leaders from Business History, that is kicking off on December 2 at 5;30 p.m. with a lecture and discussion about how a handful of immigrants created the movie industry, The Big Screen.  The Story of Enterprise is sponsored by the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center and Herb Kelleher Center for Entreprenuership of the McCombs School of Business.

Hoover is the founder of Austin-based Bookstop, which grew to be the fourth largest bookstore chain in the nation before being acquired by Barnes & Noble in 1989.  he also founded Hoover’s, Inc., one of the world’s largest online providers of information about industries, companies and executives. The company went public in 1999 and was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 2003. Hoover has served in numerous advisory positions in education and business, including a five-year stint on the board of directors at Whole Foods Market.

The Story of American Business Editor Guest on KAZI Book Review

The November 29 guest on KAZI Book Review is Nancy Koehn, editor of The Story of American Business: From the Pages of the New York Times.  Listen live to the interview 12:30 p.m. – 1 p.m. central time at  http://www.live365.com/stations/kazifm?site=pro&play. The Story of American Business which focuses on The New York Times’ most fascinating and relevant articles about business, opens a compelling window onto how one of the most powerful economies in human history came to be, including the men and women who have helped create it. Introduced and narrated by Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, The Story of American Business walks you through content ranging from feature stories to in-depth news analysis to obituaries, spanning from the 1850s to today.

Nancy Koehn

Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn’s research focuses on entrepreneurial leadership and how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact.  At the Harvard Business School, she teaches the MBA elective Entrepreneurial Leadership in Turbulent Times.  She is currently working on a book about the most important leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln’s journey and another on social entrepreneurs. Nancy is also the author of Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (2001) and The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire .

Greening Your Business to Grow Profits Focus of November 23 Economic Perspectives

Jennifer Kaplan

Jennifer Kaplan, author of Greening Your Small Business: How to Improve Your Bottom Line, Grow Your Brand, Satisfy Your Customers – and Save the Planet is the November  23 guest on Economic Perspectives, 5:30 p.m. – 6 p.m. on KAZI 88.7 FM.  Listen live to the interview online at http://www.live365.com/stations/kazifm?site=pro&play.

Greening Your Small Business is a resource for those who want their small businesses to be cutting- edge, competitive, profitable, and eco-conscious.  Filled with stories from small business owners of all stripes, Greening Your Small Business addresses every aspect of going green, from basics such as recycling, reducing waste, energy efficiency, and reducing the IT footprint, to more in-depth concerns such as green marketing and communications, green business travel, and green employee benefits.
For companies too small to hire consultants to draft and implement green policies and practices, this guide is designed for easy use, featuring:

• Simple ways to make the workplace greener
• Two plans of action for going green (divided into two levels)
• Definitions for green terminology and jargon

Kaplan is a partner in Greenhance a marketing consultancy that provides ecowise advice to help small businesses grow greener. She has more than 20 years of marketing experience with companies such as Discovery Channel, Lifetime Television, Conde Nast Publications and Simon & Schuster Publishing. An Adjunct Faculty in Marketing at Marymount University, she has conducted in-depth research into consumer attitudes about how small businesses can most effectively go green.

Chronicle of Efforts to Save U.S. Financial System Focus of KAZI Book Review

Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big To Fail: The inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system and themselves, is the November  22 guest on KAZI Book Review, 12:30 p.m. – 1 p.m. on KAZI 88.7 FM.  (If you missed this interview and would like to know when it will be available to download to a CD or your mp3 player or IPOD email hopeton@econpers.com) Sorkin delivers a behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world’s economy.

“We’ve got to get some foam down on the runway!” a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world’s financial system would experience.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (photo by Brent Murray)

Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing never disclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were “too big to fail,” it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.

Sorkin is the award-winning chief mergers and acquisitions reporter for The New York Times, a columnist, and assistant editor of business and finance news. He is also the editor and founder of DealBook, an online daily financial report. He has won a Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in business journalism, and a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.

November 15 KAZI Book Review Features Author of TOO BIG TO SAVE?: How to Fix the U.S. Financial System

Robert Pozen, author of  TOO BIG TO SAVE?: How to Fix the U.S. Financial System is the November 15 guest on KAZI Book Review on KAZI 88.7 FM, 12:30 p.m. – 1p.m. You can listen to the interview live on the web at http://www.live365.com/profiles/kazifm.

Widely recognized for his leadership in both finance and economic policy, Pozen takes federal policymakers to task for spending huge sums of money with too few benefits for America’s taxpayers. Instead, he urges our government to rein in its bailouts, stop buying toxic assets, and provide more incentives for the private sector to regulate itself.  Pozen argues that:   

• The key to our economy’s recovery is the revival of loan securitization
• Broad-based legislative restrictions on executive compensation tend to backfire
• Fair value accounting did not cause the financial crisis and should mostly be retained
•  International cooperation won’t do much to prevent future financial crises
• Regulatory gaps should be closed without creating omnibus agencies

Within a sweeping analysis, TOO BIG TO SAVE? chronicles the collapse of our financial system, one domino at a time from mortgage-backed securities to stock markets, from money market funds to recapitalized banks, and from the SEC’s mistakes to international protectionism. Pozen then suggests how the securitization process should be reformed, assesses the impact of the financial crisis on the stock and bond markets, and evaluates the federal bailout of financial institutions by buying their stock and toxic assets.

Robert Pozen

 Pozen is Chairman of MFS Investment Management, which manages over $150 billion in assets for more than five million investors worldwide.  He was formerly vice chairman of Fidelity Investments and president of Fidelity

Management & Research Company, the investment advisor to the Fidelity mutual funds.  He served on President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security and as Secretary of Economic Affairs for Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.  He is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and has contributed numerous articles to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Times.

How Today’s Smartest Businesses From Facebook to Twitter Grow Themselves Focus of November 16 Economic Perspectives

Adam Penneberg, author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, will be the November 16 guest on Economic Perspectives on KAZI 88.7 FM, 5:30- 6 p.m.  You can listen to the interview live on the web at http://www.live365.com/profiles/kazifm.

“Here’s something you may not know about today’s Internet. Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a flourishing business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will flock to throw money at you,” explains Pennenberg.

Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Penenberg calls a “viral loop”–to use it, you have to spread it. After all, what’s the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.

In this game-changing must-read, Penenberg tells the fascinating story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses–some worth billions of dollars–that we have all grown to rely on. The trick is that they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them.

Adam Pennenberg

All kinds of businesses–from the smallest start-ups to nonprofit organizations to the biggest multinational corporations–can use the paradigm-busting power of viral loops to enable their business through technology. Viral Loop is a must-read for any entrepreneur or business interested in uncorking viral loops to benefit their bottom line.

Penenberg is a journalism professor and assistant director of the Business and Economic Program at New York University. A contributing writer to Fast Company, he has also written for Inc., Forbes, the New York Times, Slate, Wired, The Economist, Playboy and Mother Jones. A former senior editor at Forbes and reporter for Forbes.com, he garnered national attention in 1998 for unmasking serial fabricator Stephen Glass of The New Republic. Penenberg’s story was a watershed for online investigative journalism.

Strategies for Career Success Focus of October 26 Economic Perspectives

In this time of economic and job insecurity, people need to make their mark and prove that they are essential and indispensable to their company. According to Carla Harris, a twenty year veteran of Wall Street, knowledge and diligence simply aren’t enough to successfully climb the corporate ladder in today’s competitive work environment.  The October 26 edition of Economic Perspectives on KAZI 88.7 FM features an interview with Harris, author of EXPECT TO WIN: Proven Strategies for Success from a Wall Street Vet.   In her book Carla looks closely at her own ascent to the top and offers strategies that will ensure career advancement and success in any industry.

During her twenty-year career on Wall Street, Harris she’s executed the IPO’s for UPS, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Redback, as well as the $3.2 billion common stock transaction for Immunex, one of the largest biotechnology offerings in United States History. While climbing the competitive corporate ladder, Harris sought guidance from her mentors and superiors, but found some of their career advice too general. As her own career advanced, Harris built her “key survival tools” or “pearls,” and vowed when she reached upper management and people looked to her for advice, she would provide them with what they needed to do to fulfill their true career potential.

In EXPECT TO WIN is Harris offers advice in an easy-to-read format using “Carla’s Pearls.” Her proven strategies of success include:

• You Are the Captain of Your Career: The 90 Day Rule
• Leveraging Your Voice: Articulate Your Views and Expectations
• Power in the Network: Competitive Advantage
• Expect to Win: Show Up With Your Best Self Every Day

Carla Harris

Carla Harris is currently a managing director for Morgan Stanley and has spent over seventeen years of her career in capital markets. She has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including Black Enterprise’s “75 Most Powerful Women in Business” (2006), Black Enterprise’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” (2006), Fortune’s “The Most Influential List” (2005), Ebony Magazine’s “15 Corporate Women at the Top” (2004), Essence Magazine’s list of “The 50 Women Who Are Shaping the World” (2003), and Fortune’s list of “The 50 Most Powerful Black Executives in America” (2002).