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September 13, 1999

Gaining outside experience	Insects visit Marin
Hail to the digital republic	Moving on to army soil
What’s behind the words	A lack of focus?

Gaining outside experience

Florence Stickney, who runs the Center for Small Business at SFSU, contributed to an article in the March 7 edition of The Sunday Examiner-Chronicle on the difficulties of succession for family businesses. One of the positive trends she sees is an increase in people in their 20s and 30s who choose to work outside the family business for a while before coming back to take over. She said, "They come back with a different perspective . They’ve been beat up. They’ve had the opportunity to see how other businesses are run. They can take that experience and make the business better."

The Marin Independent Journal reported on a visit to the Belvedere-Tiburon Child Care Center by Norman Gershenz, director of the Center for Ecosystem Survival, and his colleagues from SFSU’s Insect Discovery Lab. The children at the center learned about and interacted with exotic insects that ranged from the Madagascar hissing beetle to several Malaysian giant thorny walking sticks. The visit was part of the Center for Ecosystem Survival’s campaign to educate others about the importance of rainforest preservation. The organization has already raised funds to purchase 11 million acres of rainforest land and coral reef, according to the July 28 report.

Ray Maghroori, Dean of the College of Business, was invited to write a guest opinion for the July 9 San Francisco Business Times. In his column, Maghroori lauded the ability e-mail offers "rank-and-file workers to communicate with the top." He writes "This is beginning to pave the road for an increase in the worker’s ability to influence organizational decisions. Now the leaders in an organization can have immediate access to what their employees think … thus, the evolution of e-mail is beginning to introduce a certain level of democracy in the workplace; something that is positive and something that was quite unintended when organizations began to use [it]."

"We have so many lessons of defeat and failure, so few are the successes," said Angela Gonzales, American Indian studies professor, in a June 29 article in The San Francisco Chronicle. Gonzales was commenting on the success that the Oakland-based United Indian Nations has had in finding business partners and putting together a proposal to build an "eco-park" and an American Indian Museum and Cultural Center on the former Oakland Army Bas e.

When Tawain’s President, Lee Tenghui, said that relations between his country and China should be "state to state," his comments created fears that tensions between the two states would overflow into conflict. But Jensen Chung, a professor of communications at SFSU, took a more placid view in the July 14 San Francisco Examiner. He says, "Lee is well-known for his verbal gaffes, just like Willie Brown in San Francisco." Chung also specul ated that, "Lee’s comment was timed to influence the island’s presidential elections in March" by encouraging pro-independence voters to support his hand-picked successor.

Free-lance journalist Lee Hubbard contributed a column to the June 7 San Francisco Examiner that criticizes the Rev. Jesse Jackson for focusing too much on foreign issues and not enough on domestic problems. SFSU political science professor Robert Smith is quoted in the column as saying, "He [Jackson] goes from Wall Street, to voter registration, to running to Africa, to being a preacher to the president. Jackson has no fixed program or agenda. "

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