Congratulations to the Kansas City Royals on a great season and a great win in the World Series last night! Arguably the Royals didn’t play anywhere near their best baseball in the playoffs (uncharacteristic errors, big lack of power hitting compared to last year’s playoffs or even the regular season) and yet they were still […]

Picture from National Museum of American History via Flickr Though they never coined the phrase, almost a century before the Midwest started promoting itself as the “Silicon Prairie”, Russell and Clara Stover may have viewed this region more appropriately as the “Chocolate Prairie”.   Their rags to riches story speaks volumes to the power and will […]

   Looking through the lens of nostalgia, business used to be simple.  You could set up a road side stand (or the equivalent) and offer things that people wanted locally.  Your long term success totally depended on your local reputation and at the end of the day it was more about how you interacted with […]

   photo by visulogik I ran across an interesting article on CNN Money that talked about how recessions don’t spark start-ups – essentially the number of new businesses that get started every year (at least over the last 30 years) is steady and doesn’t have any correlation to difficult times (or much of anything else). […]

  photo by jurvetson  The American way is the creative and entrepreneurial spirit that remains strong even in the face of a terrible economy, bad news and a lot of reasons for people to be depressed. I was fortunate enough to participate in the Kansas City Startup Weekend this past weekend and I came away […]