Rooted in my Heritage: An Entrepreneurial Journal

This week we evaluated what it means to be change makers in the world of entrepreneurship.  Overwhelmingly, being a change maker is more than just making a profit in the financial sector. Being a changemaker means that the businesses we create exist to solve a problem, fill a need, or make something better and easier for mankind. This was a key point in the article "What's a Business For?" written by Charles Handy.  Mr. Handy first recounted the problems created from an over emphasis on the bottom line that led to the erosion of trust within the capitalist sector of the United States and Britain.  With this over emphasis on an over inflated wealth system that produced no real new wealth, many companies were concerned only with how their numbers looked to their shareholders and resorted to dishonestly reporting earnings in order to keep numbers high.  However, without integrity in an economy, the system eventually comes crashing down as the unethical details come to l...

This week in our Introduction to Entrepreneurship class we studied Honesty and Ethics.  As Sister Sheri Dew stated in her 2004 devotional titled, "True Blue, Through and Through", this topic, namely having cultivated the virtue of integrity can "make or break your career." Being an honest and ethical business man or woman goes beyond trying to merely stay out of prison or even trying to stay above the law.  As we read about in Elder Lynn G. Robbin's devotional "Making a Living and a Life," being an ethical person has more to do with our motivations behind our actions than it has to do with how well we follow a law or set of business rules.  Elder Robbins used the familiar grading scale to demonstrate his point where he assigned a letter grade to various employments based upon their primary motivations for how they transact business.  Businesses matching each grade level can be found in all industries and business types throughout the world. Naturally, ...