Remembering a number of bad experiences with getting maintenance services at a car dealer, I tried to make the case to my in-laws that it would only take five minutes and ~$25/strut for two struts to fix the hatchback on my 2007 Ford Freestyle. There was likely a gas leak in one of the struts that was preventing the hatchback to stay up when I opened it. Simple fix, even for someone who knows practically nothing about cars.

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Note that there will likely be a total of six parts for this series with a recap summary at the end.):

The following backdrop and questions apply to this part of the series of musings and open discussion on entrepreneurs and decision-making (Part 1 was here):

A bit of a new angle on this blog, this post is related to the early-stages of a research effort by my wife (who is a professor of marketing at UCLA's business school) with respect to entrepreneurs and decision-making. Though I am no scholar in the area of entrepreneurial decision-making, I understand that the area of overconfidence in entrepreneurs is a well-studied and documented bias, but that there may be other biases and decision-making characteristics of entrepreneurs that could be better understood.

Listed below is a pre-release, draft copy of a brand audit on the Guitar Hero brand by Activision. I performed this mini-brand audit as a self-funded, independent party, and I created this document for reasons related to business development, marketing, and teaching purposes (brand management & consulting).

I was recently asked to do an interview at the consultant website, "Think Like A Consultant" on ethics & consulting. The full interview is posted here.

One question particularly of note was "What are the best ways to handle a client who appears to have unethical practices?" For that question, I responded as follows:

Two topics that I frequently see discussed in online forums, blogs, and articles are entrepreneurship and MBA degrees. In such venues, perspectives and responses are often very polarized, and it would not be unusual to see different camps characterizing the relationship of entrepreneurship to MBA training as either highly relevant or highly irrelevant to one another.

For those interested in nonprofit and pro-bono consulting, I have started to dip my toes in with the Taproot Foundation to do a greater good for the community. The economy is tough, and I should put myself to good use. Have not started any projects yet, but I am going through director training.

Starting to collect my favorite videos and photos on my new posterous site (marketing section at http://steveshu.posterous.com/tag/marketing) for teaching business school classes (e.g., marketing, brand management). Folks may find some of the videos and photos entertaining.

This past week I had a chance to teach an ethics session as part of a larger, core marketing course that I am teaching at Irvine University. I write this post to share my experiences on what worked and what didn't.