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...

Disciple leadership.  What is that? It's certainly not a term thrown around in everyday society, but it is the exact type of leadership that I have always attempted to use. A disciple leader is who I know I am supposed to become. A disciple leader is someone who leads by serving others.  They lead by example, never asking someone else to do a task that they are unwilling to do themselves. A disciple leader seeks to lift those they are leading to higher ground.  A disciple leader wants to build and enable others to not only someday take their place, but to perform the task even better than they could.  A disciple leader has a vision of excellence and they tease out that excellence from those under their leadership, not because they demand it, but because they recognize it as untapped potential and cultivate it in the lives of those in their stewardship. A disciple leader loves each person within their sphere of influence and treats them accordingly with utmost dignity...

This week in class we focused on learning the seven habits of highly effective people found in the book of the same name written by Steven R. Covey. It was interesting to me to see some familiar concepts that I have learned at various workshops and conferences throughout my life.  I have never read the book itself, but the first three habits that our reading covered, be proactive, begin with the end in mind, and put first things first, were all concepts that I have been taught previously. Each of these three habits together form the basis of what Mr. Covey calls the private victory.  The private victory is, essentially, getting yourself under control first.  These three habits help us consciously choose our reactions to our circumstances, create a destination for ourselves based upon our talents, interests and strengths, and then learn how to manage our time effectively.  All three skills are critical to have in our personal tool box in order to be successful in any ...

This week in our entrepreneurship class, we watched a video clip entitled, "Loyalty to God and Family" presented by Jan Newman. In this short clip he spoke about how as entrepreneurs we should always maintain our loyalty first and foremost to God and our family.  Often in the entrepreneurial world the pressures of creating a business naturally lead to putting more important but often less pressing matters to the side in order to deal with the urgent, albeit less weightier matters of the business. In the long run it is the family and our devotion to God that ends up getting short changed because we reason that God and our family will always be there after the pressing problem has resolved.  But the reality is that there will always be one pressing problem after another when running a business and if God and our families are constantly shuffled to the side, we lose our foundation that brought the business opportunity into existence in the first place. Even though the temptation...

 This week in class we explored what allows us to gain mastery. Mastery in a skill, mastery in a situation and mastery in a life all come down to perseverance.  Talent helps, education helps, relationships help, but without perseverance, mastery falls apart.  There are many things we can do to help build our perseverance and a greater level of mastery. First, it helps to know what we are trying to master.  This week we watched a video of a speech given at BYU-Idaho called "A Hero's Journey."  Within this speech I found several golden nuggets that can help each of us on the path to mastery.   The first golden nugget that I found had to do with finding what sets of skills and talents we have that we should work towards mastering.  It was suggested to find five people that are well known to us and ask them what we do better than anyone else in the world.  Press for concrete examples and evidence that supports why we do that thing better than oth...