Cutcliffe Speaks At Entrepreneurship Week

To his credit, one of David Cutcliffe's ploys for increasing student attendance has been simple: hang out with students. Whether it's teaching them how to break down football film, sharing nachos or merely shaking their hands, Cutcliffe has been immeasurably more active with students than his predecessor, Ted Roof, or either his most visible counterpart, Mike Krzyzewski. On Thursday, just less than 48 hours before his team takes the field in Blacksburg, Va., Cutcliffe will speak to a group of students in Geneen Auditorium in the Fuqua School of Business as part of Duke's Entrepreneurship Week.

The topic of his talk: "Failure, and how to respond to it."

It's an issue Cutcliffe has dealt with since his arrival in Durham in December, but it's even more relevant now that his Blue Devils have lost three in a row and seemed destined to drop their last five games of the year. An advertisement in Tuesday's Chronicle lists a few sub-topics for the talk:

• How do you plan for failure?
• What are your contingency plans?
• When it happens, how do you respond?

It seems as if Cutcliffe is uniquely qualified to speak about the topic at hand, so kudos to him for not only agreeing to address students in a time of such heavy preparation, but also for not necessarily backing away from a thorny topic that he might have wished to avoid.