Russ: This is the BusinessMakers show, heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com. This is that show that champions innovation and entrepreneurship.

John: That's right, Russ, and it's a fine thing to actually see it in practice. We've had some events lately, and they're planning an event that's gonna personify what we talk about all the time.

Russ: You know what hacks me off most about (Crosstalk) the way that the world -

John: What hacks you off? What's your beef?

Russ: - treats entrepreneurship is that they don't understand the greater good that it gives to all of us, both in the economic side, with jobs, but in innovation, the products, man!

John: That's right, and that's why the government is - the U.S. government's - putting together a department of entrepreneurship.

Russ: That'll probably help a lot.

John: Or something. It's not called that, but it's close to it.

Russ: All right, and you mentioned events, and, absolutely, we've got a couple to talk about. First and foremost, we are getting incredibly close to our 300th episode of the BusinessMakers show -

John: That's right. Three hundred of these things!

Russ: Three hundred. Right. And that definitely calls for a celebration, so mark your calendars -

John: Break out the booze, and light the cigars.

Russ: There you go. March the 10th, here in Houston, Texas - if you listen from out of town, you're welcome to join us - we're gonna hold it at the brand new -Tasting Room that isn't even open yet, over at CITYCENTRE -

John: They better hurry up and open it.

Russ: That's right. [Laughs]. They better hurry. And it's owned by a former guest on the show, Jerry Lasco, and we're gonna name the business maker of the year. It's just as the name implies - who's a business maker. We're also gonna honor our BusinessMaker bootstrapper of the year, as well as a BusinessMaker rising star of the year. March the 10th. But I also have to tell you about another cool event. It's an event hosted by the fastest-growing chamber of commerce in the United States these days. That's the Houston Women's Chamber of Commerce. They're gonna hold their 2011 conference for women on April the 6th, and they've got an incredible line-up, a keynote speaker, Tory Burch, fashion designer - I hope we can get her on the show. They've even got a panel of executive men to talk about learning the male perspective on women in business in 2011, and quite a few workshops and awards, as well. That's April the 6th. And here's our line-up for today. For today, once again, in fact we're here right now at the Doing Business Over Coffee, another one of these real cool events, and our guest this morning is gonna be Bo Bothe, cofounder and CEO of BrandExtract, and our own Esther Steinfeld's gonna be interviewing him. And we're gonna do it in front of a live audience.

John: Doesn't get any better than that. A live audience here in the palatial conference room here of PKF Texas.

Russ: But first - that's right, it's time for the BusinessMakers School of Business, and this is - you know, we don't make it in a lot of those business-school rankings. It's because I just don't think that they know how to rank us.

John: Well, see, the paradigm - we have a different paradigm on the curriculum, here, than the normal business school, and the people ranking those schools are in that old paradigm, and the problem with that is, is that as long as you stay with the old paradigm, you're gonna become more and more irrelevant to your mission, and since we have no paradigm -

Russ: Nor a mission!

John: - or a mission, and we just basically shoot from the hip - well, I think we'll do okay.

Russ: There you go. All right. And we kick off the School of Business each weekend morning with the quote of the day.

John: Quote of the day, yes.

Russ: And once again I'm staying with old P.J. O'Rourke. I just like what this guy has to say.

John: Yeah, I met him once.

Russ: Did you really?

John: Nice guy.

Russ: Yeah. This one sort of is a little bit more personal instead of business oriented, but it's good advice. "Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." I'd recommend Atlas Shrugged, right?

John: Atlas Shrugged. Let's see. How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Russ: That's right. That would be good, too.

John: That's right. Don't read Mein Kampf if you feel a heart attack coming on.

Russ: [Laughs]. No, yeah. That would be bad.

John: I would stay away from that one.

Russ: That's great advice. And that brings us to This Week in Business History. What happened during this early February week in business history, John?

John: You know, this really caught my eye back in - this week in business history in 1895. Massachusetts is where basketball was invented.

Russ: Naismith did up there, yeah. Right.

John: But also volleyball was invented by W.G. Morgan in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He was a YMCA physical-education director and created this new game that was first called mintonette and is a way to pass the time indoors and by any number of players. But it's become more than just a pastime. It's kind of a cottage industry of leagues out there, and it's an Olympic sport.

Russ: Do you think he envisioned women in bikinis playing two-on-two in the sand?

John: Well, he may have - back in 1895 he probably did not, but he probably thought, "Gee, why don't I invent the bikini along with this sport. I'll probably get more fans out to watch the game."

Russ: And then he backed off of it and said, "Naw, that's too racy."

John: "It's too racy." Okay, this week in business history, in 1931, James Dean is born in Marion, Indiana, and he had a brief career in the movies. Rebel Without a Cause, which I didn't particularly like - he kind of overacted in that. But Giant - if anybody really wants to get a good taste of what Texas is about -

Russ: He played Jett Rink.

John: Jett Rink, right, and it's a great role for him, and that was a fabulous movie.

Russ: Well, he'd be 80 this week. He didn't quite make it, though, did he?

John: He did not.

Russ: He didn't make it to 30, did he?

John: No, he did not. He may have had the good acting training, but his driving - he didn't have a good driving instructor, and so - what are you gonna do? Okay, this week in business history, 1940, the song "In the Mood" by Glenn Miller hits number one, and then, two years later, the same week in 1942, Glenn Miller was awarded the first-ever gold disk for selling a million copies of "Chattanooga Choo-Choo."

Russ: Wow. We're huge fans of his, but what sort of -

John: You know what I like most about his music, is you can understand the words. You have no reference to hos or cop killers or drugs or gangsta, no gangstas in the Glenn Miller (Crosstalk) song repertoire.

Russ: (Crosstalk) But you know, there is sort of a resurgence in some of his music with - there's a kind of swing-dance phenomena (Crosstalk) that's becoming more popular.

John: (Crosstalk) That's right. This week in business history, in 1942, is the birthday of pianist and singer-songwriter Carole King, and she had that big monster album hit called Tapestry, and there's a lot of great songs on that.

Russ: Incredible. Sixty-nine years old now.

John: Sixty-nine years old. Okay. This week in business history, shoe rationing begins in the U.S. You know, you think -

Russ: In what year?

John: Excuse me, in 1943, during World War II. The shoe manufacturers were all making boots for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps.

Russ: Do you think our society today has what it takes to handle shoe rationing?

John: I don't think this society has much tolerance for anything, but it's easy for us to talk like this - I actually believe the Americans, most Americans, are at their best when things are at their worst, sometimes.

Russ: That might be true, too, yeah.

John: Okay, this week in business history, in 1949, Arthur Miller, very famous playwright - had some talent there, wrote very depressing plays, by the way -

Russ: His specialty.

John: - and one of them was Death of a Salesman, and it opened at the Morosco Theater this week in business history, ran for 742 performance, and it was awarded the Tony Award, the Pulitzer Prize - 'cause if you have a depressing plot in a play and you run counter to the American ideal -

Russ: - of optimism.

John: - of optimism, then you're gonna win all kinds of awards, you know, and that's probably why he did that because he wrote after the fall, which - actually, so, of the plays I've seen of his, that's probably one of the better ones, but still it ends in - it doesn't quite end in death, but it might as well. So, anyway, again, it - Willy Loman, salesman - according to the viewpoint of Arthur Miller, nothing's worse than being a salesman, so -

Russ: [Laughs]. And he wasn't hitting his numbers, either?

John: No, no.

Russ: Not making quota. [Laughs].

John: Anyway, this week in business history, the McGuire Sisters' "Sincerely" single goes to number one. This is this week in business history in 1955.

Russ: What a song.

John: It goes to number one, stays number one for ten weeks. This week in business history in 1962, President Kennedy begins the blockade of Cuba, and the United States bans all Cuban imports and exports, but he did not sign that ban, enact the ban, until he got, like, 1,000 Cuban cigars shipped to him, so he was -

Russ: [Laughs]. Is that really true?

John: It's true, yeah. He got his cigar shipment taken care of.

Russ: Just get a big order in right away _______.

John: The blockade of Cuba was a quite heroic thing for him to do, but it all happened because of his unimpressive performance with Nikita Khrushchev earlier in Vienna, when Khrushchev just kind of walked all over him, and Kennedy admitted, later on, he wasn't at his best. However, Khrushchev looked at that and said, "This is a weak man. I can take advantage of this."

Russ: And so that's why Khrushchev was (Crosstalk) doing what he did, right?

John: (Crosstalk) And then the missiles in Cuba, and thank goodness Kennedy stepped it up back then. This week in business history, in 1969, the world's largest airplane at the time, the Boeing 747 - that's that one with that kind of a hump over the -

Russ: Yeah, the upstairs cabin.

John: - the upstairs, where the cockpit is - makes its first commercial flight. Quite an airplane.

Russ: No kidding.

John: Okay. This week in business history, in 1971, the NASDAQ stock-market index debuts. NASDAQ originally stood for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation, but the exchange's official stance is the acronym is obsolete, and Bernie Madoff ran that exchange for a while.

Russ: Yeah. He knew what he was doing.

John: Well, I think he was on-the-job training.

Russ: [Laughs]. Right.

John: Anyway - it seems like most of the younger - not start-up, but younger technology-based companies -

Russ: - launch on NASDAQ, right, yeah.

John: They seem to gravitate towards that exchange. This week in business history, 1989, the World Wrestling Federation wanted to be deregulated somehow someway, so they had to admit that the wrestling is really not a sport but it's just an exhibition.

Russ: I wonder if that was hard for them to do.

John: It was very hard for them to do, but you still gotta be pretty coordinated -

Russ: Oh, yeah. And it's amazing. It doesn't seem to have hurt their popularity and attendance whatsoever.

John: Not really. No. I think it probably has cleared the air somewhat, but it hasn't affected their business. I mean, there are probably other things. The drugs that some of these wrestlers were using that would cause them to murder their families -

Russ: [Laughs]. Right. That's not good.

John: That's not good.

Russ: [Laughs]. No, that's not good.

John: This week in business history, in 1990, the U.S.S.R. Communist Party agrees to allow opposition parties -

Russ: That was sort of the beginning of the end, then, right?

John: That's right, and now it looks like the form of that government -

Russ: They're coming back.

John: - is coming back, right. This week in business history, in 1993, General Motors sues NBC, alleging that their Dateline NBC program had rigged two car-truck crashes to show that these pick-up trucks were prone to fire, and they put little explosive devices -

Russ: Right, we've talked about it before - this just irked me so - I loved it that they were busted for doing this, but, goodness gracious, to imagine we've been watching the things on the show -

John: I tell you, this happens a lot more than you think.

Russ: Still, to this day, right?

John: Yeah, and the saying goes, "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."

Russ: [Laughs]. Right. And that wraps up this morning's history lesson.

John: That's all I got.

Russ: Okay. Good history. Volleyball, Dateline, U.S.S.R., WWF -

John: Bernie Madoff training school at the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Russ: All right, and that brings us to the Jargon Challenge Round. This is our vocabulary lesson, where I go out and find a -

John: Define what it is.

Russ: - new word or phrase and keep it hidden from John all week -

John: Yeah, in a mayonnaise jar.

Russ: That's right.

John: Hermetically sealed.

Russ: And we come in here, and in a contest format, I challenge him to see if he can use -

John: And I accept that challenge.

Russ: - his cognitive skills to come up with a meaning.

John: And I'm right more often than -

Russ: You are. These days you are. This is a two-word noun - jail mail.

John: Jail mail.

Russ: Jail mail,

John: Jail mail. It has nothing to do with prison.

Russ: Let me correct you. It does.

John: Oh, it does, huh?

Russ: [Laughs]. Yeah, you're already -

John: I thought it was one of these words that fakes you -

Russ: No, it's a tough one. It's a real tough one.

John: Jail mail is a e-mail that goes to - actually, you're not allowed to privately receive e-mail while you're in prison, so the mail goes to the prison server, and then they allow you -

Russ: Wrong. Wrong.

John: - once a month to go get your -

Russ: I bet you are allowed to receive it. You know, freedom of communications and stuff. But anyway, what it is it's a letter to the editor sent by a prison inmate.

John: Oh, I see. All right.

Russ: Do you get much jail mail at your paper?

John: Occasionally I - once a year will probably get something.

Russ: All right. And that brings us to Dumb Moments in Business History. Do you have a story for us today?

John: Yeah, Mr. Mubarak - I'm just looking at what's going on over in Egypt right now -

Russ: Hosni Mubarak.

John: Hosni Mubarak, and he was on the reviewing stand with Anwar Sadat the day Sadat was assassinated.

Russ: That's right. He was like his number-two guy. He was a military guy.

John: Yeah, but nobody really knew who he was, and somehow he becomes the dictator of Egypt, and he said he was only gonna do it for a few years and then -

Russ: - pass the baton -

John: - go to free elections or something, and then what happens usually with a dictator, someone who has dictatorial tendencies, is they - once they smell that control, riches that come with it, they change, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to keep from being assassinated because they don't have elections, so the opposition knows the only way they can get rid of this guy -

Russ: You kill him.

John: - is to kill him. And right now there's a bunch of people in the process of wanting to do that. And he should have gotten out a long time ago, kept his promises. That's how you get memorialized in the proper way in politics.

Russ: So you got some advice here for other directors, right?

John: Yeah, well, it'll be unheeded, of course, but that is - remember, you're there to serve the people. If you're running the country, you should run it with a servant's heart -

Russ: And take some money at some point and go to the beach and let somebody else run it, and not your son, right?

John: Yeah, right, and I think that was the straw that broke the camel - of course, there's a lot of camels in Egypt - camel's back, was he was gonna turn the whole thing -

Russ: Over to his son.

John: - over to number-one son, yeah.

Russ: And just keep the whole family tree running. All right.

John: Okay. So if you're ever in charge of a country someday, just remember - fame is fleeting.

Russ: All right. And before we wrap up this morning's School of Business, it's time for the very popular PKF Texas Entrepreneur's Playbook, so let's welcome Mr. Greg Price.

John: Greg didn't have too far to walk this time.

Russ: No, right here at his house.

John: A one, and a two, and a -

[Entrepreneur's Playbook]

Russ: All right, and that wraps up this morning's School of Business. Stay tuned in as Esther Steinfeld interviews Bo Bothe, the founder and CEO of BrandExtract. You're listening to the BusinessMakers show, heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com.