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Author: Elmira Bayrasli
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Whole Foods Education?
David Boudreaux wants to fix education badly. Stymied by unions and low standards, the economics professor makes a case in this Wall Street Journal piece for learning to be unshackled from government in order to be courted by capitalists. Sadly, in comparing public schools to supermarkets, he fails. To advocate that our children’s learning be improved by modeling it after the market forces that bring us produce is, while provocative, preposterous.
What if they were Muslim?
A gun rampage outside of Amsterdam last night left seven people dead. A 24-year old Dutchman, Tristan van der Vlist, has been identified as the suspect. The story is buried under the fold, on page 14 in the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal relies on the Associated Press for the information. The incident [...]
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Stop it
The news that CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square is infuriating. I’m literally shaking as I type this. And I’m not sure why I’m typing other than to say this: How many violent acts against women must occur, in how many different places before we, as [...]
In Egypt, entrepreneurship isn’t all business
In Egypt, the all-entrepreneurship, all-the-time Kauffman Foundation’s Dane Stangler and Bob Litan say, revitalization in the post-Mubarak era “can start by making it easier to start and operate a business.” Yes. This is why I love those Kansas City guys. In Egypt, give ‘em entrepreneurship. I’d go two steps further: 1) @lajump, aka Leslie, rightly [...]
Bring in the anthropologists
The FT’s Gillian Tett makes a strong case for why Western for-profits should consider having an anthropologist on staff. “Cross-cultural exchanges,” she says are gaining relevance. Proctor & Gamble discovered this when selling diapers in Brazil. Instead of biodegradable, the American multinational observed that waterproof was more important for Brazilians. Now, companies are reconsidering how [...]
Egypt: not just an Arab tale
On Wednesday, I listened to “Mr. Soft Power” Joseph Nye and the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman discuss the state of U.S. foreign policy and its future. Not surprisingly Egypt came up in the discussion. Nye, ever the scholar, made an incisive observation that in Egypt “it’s not whose army wins, but whose story.” Rachman, who [...]
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In Afghanistan Hearts & Minds = Jobs
“We can make you guys richer,” says Captain Dan Kearney to a group of bearded men in eastern Afghanistan. Yet, they remain suspicious of his and his Company B’s motives for building Restrepo, a camp overlooking the Korengal Valley. It’s known to be the most dangerous in the region. That makes it all the more [...]
Move over MBAs…
Last week it was this “tweet” by Kenneth Cole. This week Groupon‘s Super Bowl ad. Both went into immediate damage control. But it was Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s “mea culpa” that grabbed my attention: “I’ve been spending the day listening to the negative feedback about our Tibet Super Bowl commercial, and want to take a [...]
In Egypt, give ‘em entrepreneurship
In the frenzy to understand, analyze and predict the historic events unfolding in Egypt, many rightly have focused on the Egyptian economy. Here are some interesting data points: A year ago, Egypt’s government released figures on the country’s poverty. It showed that it had reached 23.4 percent, “up from 20 percent the previous year.” In [...]
Not so fast food