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Not long ago, I was talking with Ken Leahy, former IBEC Director and board member. He was giving me an update on the for-profit Discovery Eye Institute (DEI) in Ethiopia (owned by Sight for Souls in the USA). Ken is the treasurer of DEI and along with Gwen Rapp provided IBEC consulting services for DEI. […]

Historian Richard Morris suggests that there are seven key Founding Fathers.  Predictably they are John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington. If you are an entrepreneur or a business owner, you may identify most with Benjamin Franklin. Arguably he may have been the most successful inventor, entrepreneur

I recently traveled to Brazil which required a total of 48 hours in airports and on airplanes, so I bought David McCullough’s recent book The Wright Brothers and loaded it on my kindle. I thought I needed an old-fashioned story closer to my generational understanding. I had just designed curriculum for a West Coast university

“Everyone wins when a leader gets better” – Bill Hybels Have you every read a blog or an article and you say, “I wish I had written that!” Well, this is one for me. I immediately thought I would pass it on, even in a world where it seems everyone has something to say about

Trivia Question: What do these countries have in common: Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, South Sudan and East Timor? Answer: All are new countries since 2000! And the newest of them is South Sudan which is also the poorest. Imagine this landlocked country with 12.2 million people (and 60 major ethnic groups), newly independent in 2011,

It is graduation time in America – first college and then high school. In an age where it is all too common to tell grads that they can do whatever they set out to do, and other “sweet nothings”, Bill Gates recently tweeted some no-nonsense advice to new graduates (May, 15 on his Twitter page:

Bob Bush is the Managing Director of IBEC and writes about one of the projects where he serves as a consultant. We continually thank God not only for clients like Founders Imports but the coaches and consultants who serve them. Founders Imports (foundersimports.com) is a perfect example of what can happen when a family comes

This week I received an update phone call from the Director of IBEC, Robert Bush. Among the various topics, he made reference to a conversation he had with a “friendly competitor”. I knew the individual and considered him certainly friendly, but I had not given the notion of competition much thought. As I reflected on

Because of my penchant for hiking I was intrigued to read recently about the hiking couple who spent 47 days stranded in a canyon in the Himalayas. The 20-year old Taiwanese man was rescued, surviving on salt and water after his food ran out 5 weeks earlier; he had lost 66 pounds. However, his unfortunate

Business as Mission (BAM) narratives oftentimes focus on the founder or the entrepreneur credited with the initial startup leadership; and rightly so; but sometimes the real reason for success may rest with the #2 or #3 person. Sometimes key success factors can be traced to the “second in command”. Since graduating with a business degree