Mental Model by Joshua Kennon

Mental Model: Intergenerational Transmission and What It Has to Do With Adrian Peterson Beating His Child

Mental Model: Intergenerational Transmission and What It Has to Do With Adrian Peterson Beating His Child A huge percentage of the people in this community are fans of the mental model concept – ideas, like tools, that can be used to analyze, study, and understand both why and how something is happening – made popular by Charles…

Bob Jones University Public Domain Photograph

Read the Amazing, Fantastical, Autocratic Bob Jones University Student Handbook

I mentioned the infamous Bob Jones University student handbook in an earlier post after explaining it was the school from which one of the extremist authors I was reading as part of a self-imposed cultural studies program graduated back in 1950.  It was the university that famously insisted God didn’t want blacks intermingling with whites and refused…

McDonald's Counter In New Store Copyright Joshua Kennon

Dealing with Business Rejection, the McDonald’s Franchise Disclosure Document, and a $114 Million Coffee Fortune

From time to time, I get messages from business owners or entrepreneurs who are discouraged and upset.  Their family, friends, colleagues, bank officers, or suppliers don’t believe in what they are trying to do and they take it personally.  This afternoon, as I sat in a McDonald’s restaurant having coffee and revisiting an excellent book called McDonald’s Behind the Arches that details the historical rise of one of the world’s largest real estate portfolio masquerading as a hamburger chain, I was reminded of a story I first read back in college that I think has a lot of powerful lessons.