Hunter Hastings

Hunter Hastings

Hunter Hastings is a member of the Mises Institute, Business Consultant, and co-chair of the Rescue California Educational Foundation. He is also host of the Economics for Entrepreneurs podcast.

Articles by Hunter Hastings

Phil Simon on Tectonic Changes in the Workplace

Austrian economics recognizes change as a constant and provides guidance for adapting to it and managing it. Change is changing for business — it’s faster and more fundamental in the digital age. Austrian economics can help even more as a result of its practical and realist approach to adaptation and continuous adjustment.

Knowledge Capsule
Change is changing.
Change is a constant. You can think of the market in constant flux, as Mises did, You can think in terms of VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. You can think of it in terms of complexity or of absolute uncertainty. However you tune your mind and your business processes, there are always going to be more things that can happen than you can predict or prepare for.
There are some ways to think better

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Sharekh Shaikh On The Digital Revolution In Market Research

Market research is a tool for gathering data about customers and consumers that businesses hope will lead to insights about their behaviors and preferences that can be translated into innovation, better service and better business performance. As with any dynamic system, it has changed over time, and the effects of entropy have begun to show themselves in invalid techniques, invalid data, and invalid conclusions. And as with virtually all business systems, the coming of the digital age provides businesses with the opportunity to review, revise and improve exiting practice and existing thinking.

Knowledge Capsule
Traditional models of market research are losing validity.
The Economics For Business approach to market research leans to the qualitative, such as one-on-one

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Graceann Bennett: Brands Are Value-Generating Assets, Marketing Is Just Tactics

Peter Drucker famously identified the only two value-generating functions of the firm as innovation and marketing. We propose to differentiate brand building (or branding) from marketing, especially in this digital age. Brands are the vehicle for framing, establishing, nurturing and enhancing relationships with customers. In the digital age, marketing has become mechanized and mathematicised; it’s about numbers more than about human values and emotional bonding. Graceann Bennett is a branding expert who has devoted her career and her research agenda to furthering the science of brand building.

Knowledge Capsule
Brands are assets that drive customer value and business revenue, and they’re more valuable than ever in the digital age.
Our Economics For Business entrepreneurial method

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Jeff Grogg: Building The New Production Structure Of Entrepreneurial Capitalism

It’s time to re-imagine how entrepreneurs bring their innovative value propositions to market at the appropriate scale to meet the important needs of millions of people. The new way of thinking is for entrepreneurs to focus all their energy on designing, refining and strengthening the value proposition, and then plugging in to a network of resources assembled by others so that customers enjoy the full realization of the value experience the entrepreneurial has designed. Jeff Grogg of JPG Resources joined Economics For Business to describe how this works in the CPG food and beverage industry.

Knowledge Capsule
Starting From A New Value Proposition.
The entrepreneurial journey — whether starting a new company or launching or improving a brand or launching and managing a new

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Steven Blustein: A New Structure Of Production—The Plug-in Entrepreneurial Network

A lot economic thinking about the structure of production and entrepreneurs’ challenges in the assembly of resources can be revised in the 21st Century. There are networks of value-driving resources already assembled, connected and operating, into which entrepreneurs can plug their business ideas. We talked to the CEO of one of the leading networks for insights into how it works.

Knowledge Capsule
Entrepreneurs are rethinking and redesigning the production structure of the economy.
Value generation includes the identification of unmet customer needs, the design of a new solution for those needs, and the assembly of a production structure to deliver the solution in the form the customer prefers to experience it.
Historically, entrepreneurs have been required to master all three

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Erik Schön: The Art Of Strategy

What is strategy, and is it useful for business? Business schools want you think it is the critical factor in competitive success or failure. They teach structured markets, divided up by market share, with boundaries and external and internal forces to be assessed and countered. “Where to play and how to win.” They see strategy through their lens of financialization and utilize fictitious economic calculations like discounted future cash flows and market capitalization.

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Tom Malengo on Brandjectory, An Innovative New Platform for Launching and Growing Entrepreneurial Businesses

A great benefit of the internet age is the capacity to accumulate, accelerate, and intensify connections between entrepreneurs, knowledge sources, investors, mentors, collaborators, and service providers. Businesses with a valid value proposition who are in the launch and early expansion phases can interconnect a network of powerful and qualified resources to support their growth.

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Darshan Mehta: Insights Are Game Changers For Business

What drives customer behavior and customer choices? It’s the existential question for business; you’ve got to know the answer. But it’s a mystery, hard to unlock. The solution to this answer lies in what market researchers call insights, based on the Austrian deductive method that we summarized in episode #164 with Per Bylund (Mises.org/E4B_164).

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Bharat Kanodia: How Subjective Value Generates Valuation In Business

All value is subjective. But often, when an exchange is to be made, a numerical value is required. It’s a special kind of economic calculation, what Bharat Kanodia terms “a subjective opinion based on objective facts”.
Bharat has built a career on valuations, from 2-founder garage start-ups to the Eiffel Tower. He shares his knowledge, experience, and insights with the Economics For Business podcast.

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Fabrice Testa on Super Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is a method, and it’s also a mindset. Fabrice Testa has written a book that brilliantly integrates the two: he calls the integration "Super Entrepreneurship," and his book title is therefore Super Entrepreneurship Decoded (Mises.org/E4B_139_Book).

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Ramon Ray’s Entrepreneurial Communities

“Small business” is just a government classification. Entrepreneurial businesses serving well-defined communities via creative specialization exhibit enormous economic productivity, energy and dynamism.
Such businesses can not be defined quantitatively as small, medium or large. They’re defined by their qualitative impact on their customers’ lives. 

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Curt Carlson on Innovation Champions

Austrian economics sees an economy in motion, perpetually renewing itself. Economic agents (firms, customers, investors) constantly change their actions and strategies in response to outcome they mutually create. This further changes the outcome, which requires them to adjust afresh.

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Ralph Welborn on the Ecosystem-Based Strategy

Business strategy and business model design has traditionally been firm-centric. Entrepreneurs are called upon to establish firms, to make the firm the locus of value creation through value proposition design, assembly of resources, and production; and to ensure competitive advantage in comparison to rival firms pursuing the same customers.

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Rory Sutherland: How The Austrian Approach Helps Entrepreneurs Multiply Value

Key Takeaways And Actionable Insights. In episode 60, we are joined by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing agencies, one with a long tradition of customer insights. His latest book is titled Alchemy, which explores how a deep understanding of subjective value can lead to outstandingly effective creative marketing.

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6b.) P: Mises.org 2015-02-20 22:15:00

Our daily lives are determined by our choices as individual economic actors. When governments intervene in our personal economics, they intervene in our personal preferences and choices, writes Hunter Hastings.This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Dianna Keiler.

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