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I am passing on the English translation of a call for book chapters issued by a friend and colleague in Dijon, France.  The book is international and has a broad business management focus.

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As the editor of a forthcoming book, it is my greatest pleasure to invite you to submit articles as chapters. The tentative title is: Strategic Managerial Approaches to Crowdfunding Online. The book will be published by IGI Global publishers in the USA, within the series “Advances in Business Strategy and Competitive Advantage (ABSCA).”

Please read carefully the following guidelines for submission:

The context

The emerging crowdfunding phenomenon is a collective effort by individuals who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet and without any specific conventional financial intermediation, in order to invest in and support for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures initiative undertaken by other people or organizations. The spontaneous interactions and transactions between individuals allow relatively considerable fund raisings by drawing on small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the Internet, without standard financial intermediaries.

The advent of crowdfunding coincides with the democratization of information technologies that enable people to contact, interact, collaborate and exchange at lowest costs, if not for free. In fact, information technologies have allowed the drastic reduction of transaction costs and by the same the revival of ancient forms of transactions such as auctions, barter, tenders, recycling, and direct transactions between individuals.

Many platforms encourage crowdfunding such as Kiva, Babyloan, MyC4 in lending to the poor entrepreneurs, Prosper, Kapipal and Zopa in P2P social lending, Kickstarter, MyMajorCompany in entrepreneurial projects, SellaBand in music, etc.

Larry Cunningham has a further post on his forthcoming book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values, over at Concurring Opinions.  The post includes an excerpt from Chapter 8 of the book, Autonomy, and links to the full text of the chapter, available on SSRN for free (!) download.  Larry’s and my earlier posts on the book here on the BLPB can be found here, here, here, and here.

Here’s a slice of the excerpt included in the Concurring Opinions post:

. . . Berkshire corporate policy strikes a balance between autonomy and authority. Buffett issues written instructions every two years that reflect the balance. The missive states the mandates Berkshire places on subsidiary CEOs: (1) guard Berkshire’s reputation; (2) report bad news early; (3) confer about post-retirement benefit changes and large capital expenditures (including acquisitions, which are encouraged); (4) adopt a fifty-year time horizon; (5) refer any opportunities for a Berkshire acquisition to Omaha; and (6) submit written successor recommendations. Otherwise, Berkshire stresses that managers were chosen because of their excellence and are urged to act on that excellence. 

Cool stuff . . . .

One of the blogs in last week’s list of blogs I follow was Lowering the Bar, a collection of humorous legal items edited by Kevin Underhill, a San Francisco lawyer.

Underhill recently released a book, The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance. The book is a collection of silly, weird, and humorous laws, with commentary by Underhill. The title comes from an ordinance adopted by the board of commissioners of Skamania County, Washington that made it illegal to slay Bigfoot. Apparently, the threat was serious because the county commissioners designated it as an emergency ordinance so it could become immediately effective.

Both Underhill’s selection of laws and his commentary are a little uneven. Some of the laws he features are not that interesting (or funny). And Underhill’s commentary on the laws, while often quite funny, sometimes falls flat. I also wish Underhill would have provided more legislative history. He sometimes does, but not always, and it would be interesting to know what motivated some of these strange laws. But the book contains some real gems, and that alone makes it worth reading.

Some of the laws are funny because of their clear unconstitutionality. In 2011, for example, the Gould, Arkansas city…

Maybe having a suitcase that has more books in it than clothes is a sign that I need to follow Steve Bradford’s lead and get an e-reader.

This week I am in Seattle for the 2014 ALSB conference, which I may blog about when I return.  In my suitcase, in addition to a few clothes, are:

Some of these, like Bainbridge, Klein, and O’Hara’s books, I have already read, but I thought they would be worth revisiting while I wait on some new books I recently ordered.  

This doesn’t have a lot to do with Business Law, though I would submit there’s a lot to be learned from reading outside the field.  Now that I live in West Virginia, and my wife suggested I read it, I propose: Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, which seemed appropriate for a summer read.  She was right.  So far, it’s great.  I recommend it, and to support my claim, here’s a few quotes to tease you: 

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this

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We welcome Eric Orts (Wharton) to the “blawgosphere.”  Professor Orts has begun blogging at Ortsian Thoughts and Theories. I have already added his blog to my favorites, and I am sure I will become a regular reader.  His new book, Business Persons: A Legal Theory of the Firm should be in my mailbox soon, and I am looking forward to reading it as well. (H/T David Zaring at the Conglomerate).     

One of my younger brothers is a PHD Candidate in Literature at University of Alabama.  One of my younger sisters majored in English at the University of Georgia and is working in the media industry.  (Yes, I am a proud older brother, prone to brag about my siblings’ many accomplishments).

Both siblings recently encouraged me to expand my summer reading beyond books about law.  Due to the tall stack of legal books in my “need to read” pile, I usually don’t devote much time to “pleasure reading.”

This summer, however, I am trying to read legal books and, at least some books, which have no noticeable connection to law.  Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’ falls into the latter category.  I will let interested readers follow the link for a description of the book, but I only mention it here to say that Bragg writes beautifully.   I finished the 329-page book in two, long, sittings. 

Writer Pat Conroy said the following of the book and its author:

Rick Bragg writes like a man on fire.  And All Over But the Shoutin’ is a work of art. I thought of Melville, I thought of Faulkner. Because I love the

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Amazon BBB Book Cover
You may think of Warren Buffett as a savvy stock picker but his greater accomplishment is in configuring an exceptionally strong corporation that defies widespread conceptions of effective corproate governance.  

Since early in his career, Buffett adopted what he calls the double-barreled approach to capital allocation, meaning both stock picking and business buying. He gained prominence primarily as an investor in stocks, championing a contrarian investment philosophy.

Attracting three generations of devoted followers to a school of thought called “value investing,” he doubted the market’s efficiency and deftly exploited it. Buffett bought stocks of good companies at a fair price, assembling a concentrated portfolio of large stakes in a small number of firms. Today, nearly three-fourths of Berkshire’s stock portfolio consists of just seven stocks.     

But late in his career, beginning around 2000, Buffett shot more often through the other half of his double-barreled approach: buying 100 percent of companies run by trusted managers given great autonomy. True, Berkshire early on bought all the stock of companies such as Buffalo News and See’s Candies. But, through the 1990s, the first barrel dominated, with Berkshire consisting 80 percent of stocks and 20 percent owned companies. That mix gradually reversed and recently flipped, making subsidiary ownership the defining characteristic of today’s Berkshire.

Owning primarily subsidiaries rather than merely stocks gives Berkshire a different shape compared to its previous character as the holding company of a famed investor. After all, even for a buy-and-hold investor, stocks come and go. Berkshire has sold the stocks of many once-fine companies, including Freddie Mac, McDonald’s, and The Walt Disney Company.

In contrast, aside from a few Berkshire subsidiaries that it acquired from the Buffett Partnership in the 1970s, Berkshire has never sold a subsidiary and vows to retain them through thick and thin.  Despite their variety, moreover, Berkshire companies are remarkably similar when it comes to corporate culture, which is the central discovery I document and elaborate in my upcoming book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.

When Berkshire consisted mostly of the stock portfolio of a famed stock picker, you could expect that, once that investor departed, the portfolio would naturally be unwound and the company dissolved. Now, however, with Berkshire made of companies not stocks, its life expectancy stretches out in multiple decades, not mere years. It certainly goes beyond the stock picker who founded it.  That’s not an accident either, as the dominant cultural motif at Berkshire and its subsidiaries is a sense of permanence–the longest possible time horizon imaginable.   

As I promised on Friday, I am posting a question and answer segment with Larry Cunningham, author of the forthcoming book: Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.  Larry will be guest blogging with us this week to talk more about the interesting findings he shares in the book and their implications for business and the research, teaching, and practice of business law.

Q:  Why did you write this book and what did you find?

A:  Widespread praise for Warren Buffett has become paradoxical: Buffett set out to build a permanent institution at Berkshire Hathaway and yet even great admirers, such as Steven Davidoff, doubt that the company can survive without him. I found that viewpoint intriguing since companies who are identified with iconic founders often have trouble after a succession, as Tom Lin has written.  I wanted to investigate how the situation will look for Berkshire after Buffett leaves the scene, collapse and breakup or prosperity coupled with continued expansion? What I found was a culture so distinctive and strong, that the company’s future is bright well beyond Buffett.

Q:  How did you reach that conclusion?  What was your research method?

A:  I focused on Berkshire’s fifty…

The Business Law Prof Blog is delighted to have as a guest blogger next week our friend and colleague Lawrence A. Cunningham (known to me as Larry!), of George Washington University Law School, who has just finished writing a new book being released in October called Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.  He will offer a few posts about aspects of the book during the week. We will kick it off Monday with some questions and answers.   

Larry is the Henry St. George Tucker III Research Professor at GW.  He teaches accounting, contracts, and corporate governance and has written extensively in all those areas.  He previously taught at Boston College Law School, where he served a term as Academic Dean, and Cardozo Law School, where he directed the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Center on Corporate Governance.

Among his most cited articles are these scholarly jewels:

A Prescription to Retire the Rhetoric of “Principles-Based Systems” in Corporate Law, Securities Regulation and Accounting (Vanderbilt Law Review, 2007)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Yawn Heavy Rhetoric, Light Reform (And it Might Just Work) (Connecticut Law Review, 2003)

From Random Walks to Chaotic Crashes: The Linear Genealogy of the …