Uncertainty about what human enterprise could make happen has preoccupied me for most of my academic career. The preoccupation started in 1990 when John McArthur, the late great Harvard Business School Dean, gave me a copy of Frank Knight’s forgotten treatise, Risk Uncertainty and Profit. Uncertainty, and its very close relationship to human enterprise has framed much of my writing and teaching on entrepreneurship, finance and innovation ever since.

Where I I attended to human hopes, fears, and colorful discourse, scientifically-minded colleagues treated these as noise. Individual human agency and construction of meaning had no role in theories predicated on mechanistic (if sometimes biased) responses to external circumstances. Likewise my narrative-mode reasoning (as Jerome Bruner calls it) about one-offs horrified enforcers of logico-scientific methods designed to analyze recurring events.

Uncertainty and Enterprise tried pull all this together in a 2025 Oxford University Press book. Covering some of the same territory as my 2000  The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses the 2025 book stresses the role of imagination and imaginative discourse in managing the uncertainty of enterprise (which is necessarily one-off, not statistical).

By happenstance, both books coincided with manias – the Internet in 2000 and the historically unprecedented multi-trillion dollar Artificial Intelligence frenzy in 2025. Although I didn’t write either to challenge the claims underpinning the manias, this book, like its predecessor, the 2025 book implicitly does just that: it questions the value of statistical models in reproducing or predicting what human imaginations create. And the longer the LLM mania continues, the more painful will be its demise. (I’ve wasted time writing several op-eds about this, alas)

The 2025 book’s completion coincided with my retirement (Emeritus in Latin) as the Thomas Schmideiny Professor of Business from the Fletcher School at Tufts. That ended 35 years of teaching entrepreneurship at HBS, Chicago, Columbia, and finally, the Fletcher School. But no rest for the wicked. I am devoting “retirement” to:

 1) Teaching a course on Transformative Medical Advances. I first developed and taught this course as a Visiting Prof at HBS in 2021. I now teach it Columbia’s public health and engineering schools, in collaboration with a professor at the engineering school. The course integrates the spirit and many of the ideas from entrepreneurship courses and in my books on innovation and uncertainty.

 2) Teaching the course outside Columbia and helping faculty at other places to teach the course. Please contact me if you institution might be interested. My services — for helping and teaching the course are free! As are most of the student materials — no expensive text books. (Check out this video)

 3) Convening a council to promote transformative enterprise. Our goal is to “kindle the romance of progress” and sidestep the culture wars and political disagreements that are tearing universities and societies apart. Our flagship activity will be an annual conference, although we hope overtime to add a publications and educational programs. We have enlisted (as of Aug 26) fifty five distinguished members. Our first conference “Human Flourishing through Progress?” is scheduled for next summer, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust in Oxford.

Stay tuned!