My own made-up story  revolves around studying resolute enterprise whose spirit is well captured by Hokusai’s “fast cargo ship battling the waves.” That story line helps me order the apparent directionlessness of my work and encourages me to soldier on.

The story of my jagged journey starts with my joining the Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty in 1988. Around 1990,  John McArthur, the late great HBS dean, gave me a copy of Frank Knight’s forgotten treatise, Risk Uncertainty and Profit. Then, looking back, Knight’s concept of uncertainty and its intimate relationship to enterprise framed much of my writing and teaching. While I’ve covered many different subjects — startups, stock markets, globalization, productive knowledge, and medical innovation — the world view that formed after reading Knight’s book has been — in my reconstruction at least — has been consistent in its humanistic emphasis.

The humanistic emphasis has been career limiting. Hokusai’s “battling against the waves” is an apt image for my academic difficulties, and not just my subject.  

Where 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 robotic responses to external circumstances. Likewise, my narrative-mode reasoning (as Jerome Bruner calls it) horrified enforcers of logico-scientific correctness.

My 2025 book, Uncertainty and Enterprise, (with the Hokusai painting on its cover) pulled together my heterodox synthesis. 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).

Both books happened to coincide with manias – the Internet bubble in 2000 and the historically unprecedented multi-trillion-dollar Artificial Intelligence frenzy in 2025. Although I didn’t write either book to challenge rationalizations of the manias, the 2025 book, like its 2000 predecessor 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 collapse. (I’ve wasted time writing several op-eds about this, alas)

The 2025 book’s completion also 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 at Columbia’s public health and engineering schools, in collaboration with an engineering school colleague. The course integrates the spirit and many of the ideas in my 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 your institution might be interested. My services — for helping and teaching the course are free! As are most of the student materials — no expensive textbooks. (Check out this Ants, Poet, and Progress video)

3. Convening a council to for 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 to eventually add publication and educational programs. We have enlisted (as of Aug 2026) fifty-five distinguished members. Our first conference “Human Flourishing through Progress?” is scheduled for the summer of 2027 in Oxford, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust

Stay tuned!

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