Former Faculty/Former Bennett Fellow

BRIEFLY NOTED     

Alumni/ae    

Faculty    

Alumni/ae     

1935–John H. Howland. Ventures & Adventures: the Memoirs of a Vermont Businessman.(Vermont Historical Narratives, 1999)

1938–Forrest C. Eggleston, M.D. Where is God Not?: an American Surgeon in India. (Providence House Publishers, 1999)

1944–Beaumont Glass. Brahms’ Complete Song Texts in one volume with International Phonetic Alphabet Transcriptions, word for word translations and commentary. (Leyerle Publications, 1999)

1947–Alan Harris Bath. Tracking the Axis Enemy: The Triumph of Anglo-American Naval Intelligence. (University Press of Kansas, 1998)

1948–Paul Pressler. A Hill On Which To Die: One Southern Baptist’s Journey. (Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1999)

1949–James H. K. Norton [compiler]. Global Studies: India and South Asia. (Dashkin/McGraw-Hill, 1999)

1949–Prasong Sukhum. Su Pai Pan Din [Fighting the Land’s Threat][in Thai]. (Chulalongkorn University Press of Bangkok, 1998)

1958–Robert Thurman and Tad Wise. Circling the Sacred Mountain: A spiritual adventure through the Himalayas. (Bantam Books, 1999)

1958–Don Hendrie Jr. Beautiful Daughter: A Hendrie Reader. [published posthumously by his family and friends] (Lynx House Press, 1999)

1966–George D. Kinder. The Seven Stages of Money Maturity. (Delacorte Press, 1999)

1972–Robert Bruce Kelsey. Chaos and Complexity in Software: Challenging the Industry and the New Science. (Nova Science Publishers, 1999)

Welcome to the Moon: twelve lunar expeditions for small telescopes. (Naturegraph Publishers, Inc., 1999)

1981–Ethan M. Rasiel. The McKinsey Way: using the techniques of the world’s top strategic consultants to help you and your business. (McGraw-Hill, 1999)

1983–Brooks Hansen. Perlman’s Ordeal [a novel]. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)

1993–Jake Brooks and others. Nice Job!: the guide to cool, odd, risky, and gruesome ways to make a living. (Ten Speed Press, 1999)

In a business age marked by dramatic corporate consolidation—where banks, oil companies, and supermarket chains regularly merge to form larger and larger entities—starting and growing a business of one’s own has become a kind of collective fantasy for those of us just entering this increasingly anonymous work-a-day world. Visions of freedom and profit dance in our heads as we wonder how hard it could really be to open an online store, or engineer the next juice craze. While many are content to defer these office cube day dreams indefinitely, Poonam Sharma ’95 is convinced that any of us, if we really wanted to, could make our entrepreneurial dreams come true, and as far as Sharma’s concerned, the sooner we start and the younger we are, the better.

With the help of a few Harvard classmates, Poonam Sharma has written The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business. With an energetic and casual hand, the book shepherds college students and recent graduates through the trials of starting a business. The guide outlines the hurdles that line the path between an idea and a thriving company, and provides some advice for clearing them: how to find funding for a venture, how to write a business plan, how to structure a company to limit liability. The advice telescopes smoothly from the general to the specific, from what a venture capital firm is, to exactly how much growth they’re going to expect from your business, making it a valuable reference tool regardless of how much business experience you have. That the text also touches on how to fly a plane and fall in love is an added bonus.

Each chapter of the guide is written by a different student, however Sharma was the force behind the book, and besides introducing and concluding the guide she reserves the task of describing what it means to “Think Like an Entrepreneur” for herself. In this chapter Sharma pinpoints the personal qualities she sees as integral to making a person a successful entrepreneur. While the list is filled with specific personality traits, such as an “exacting mentality,” “restlessness,” “effectiveness at persuasion,” the chapter turns out to be anything but prohibitory. Yes, Sharma insists, you need to be persuasive to launch a business, but she doesn’t leave it at that. With an optimism that permeates the book, she tells us how we can become persuasive people: maintain a sense of formality, demonstrate logic, and always remember that “when dealing with older business people. . .openly acknowledge their expertise and compliment them.” Sharma shows us that the traits necessary for making it, while important, are relatively plastic. With some minor adjustments, we can all play the part we need to make our entrepreneurial dream come true. Some pretty encouraging words for those legions chomping at the cube.

—Chris Hilton ’93

Chris Hilton ’93 is a first-year medical student in Nashville, TN.

Former Faculty/Former Bennett Fellow     

A. Manette Ansay. Midnight Champagne [a novel] (William Morrow & Co., 1999)

James W. Griswold. A Guide to Medieval English Tithe Barns. (Peter E. Randall, 1999)

BRIEFLY NOTED

Alumni/ae     

1941–Sherwood E. Bain. “Pickup artist: a bicycle commuter counts his change.” In The Boston Globe Magazine (May 2, 1999)

1948–Paul D. Carrington. “My Devon: Memoir of a Nerd.” In Alibi Duke Law Literary Magazine (issue 2, spring 1999)

1957–George T. Diller. “Pour la cause de ce que j’esotoie françois: Langue(s) et loyauté(s) dans les Chroniques de Froissart(1).” In Le Moyen Age: Revue d’Histoire et de Philologie (no. 3-4, 1998)

1964–James P. Garland. “The Problems With Unitrusts” In The Journal of Private Portfolio Management (v.1, no. 4, spring 1999)

1967–Michael Burwell. “The Steamer POLITKOFSKY –Part I.” In The Sea Chest: Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society (v. 32, no. 3, March 1999)

1972–Robert Bruce Kelsey. “Alpha to Omega: beginning and end of the universe – and of cosmology.” [Review essay of three books by Michael Hawkins, Martin Rees, and Peter Coles & George F.R. Ellis] In The Practical Observer (v. 8, no. 4, 1998)

1975–Richard Lotspeich and others. “An Economic Analysis of Extortion in Russia.” In MOCT-MOST(v. 7, 1997) [Kluwer Academic Publishers, Printed in the Netherlands]

“Determinants of industrial residuals: generation and treatment: evidence from Chinese cities.” In Ecological Economics (v. 26, 1998)

“Environmental Protection in the People’s Republic of China. In Journal of Contemporary China (v. 6, no. 14, 1997)