January 25, 2003
Suggested Essay Questions
Course Number: 42.491
Course Title: Entrepreneurialist Culture- How to Bootstrap Yourself to Success in the 21st Century
A few simple things to remember:
1. When writing your essays (or anything else for that matter), put your names on your material!
2. It would help if you put your student numbers on it too.
3. Add a copyright statement claiming and asserting your copyright.
4. Give your work a (short) title- "The title can not be as long as the story," a PhD supervisor once said.
5. Use spell check, please.
6. Post your Essays to your Personal Web Sites (PWS) and bring a hard copy to class.
7. Here is why you need a PWS.
8. You need to tie your work somehow to the literature using a small number of references. But I am most interested in letting you explore these issues so it's mostly your ideas I am looking for.
9. Your piece can be anything from two or three pages to a maximum of five or six pages.
10. You may choose to write on something else not included here as long as it is relevant to Entrepreneurialist Culture and is pre-approved by the Lecturer.
11. You may elect to write up something quite different like examples of, say, things you have done or heard about or researched on your own such as: a) an example of Guerrilla Marketing, b) an example of Guerrilla Selling, c) an example of Guerrilla Marketing Research or Reverse Guerrilla Marketing Research, d) an example of Pixie Dust or Anti-Pixie Dust, e) an example of Bootstrap Capital, f) an example of Solution Selling or Reverse Selling.
Student Essays
1. Make a personal 'balance sheet' summarizing your successes and failures in life. Do the successes outweigh the failures? How do you cope with failure? Do you learn more from your successes or failures? How do you keep your perspective? What do you do to keep calm in a crisis. Give an example.
2. What do you think the most important characteristics of a successful entrepreneur are and why?
3. Why do you want to be an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur?
4. Folks say that being an entrepreneur is risky. Compare the risks of being an entrepreneur and having a j.o.b.
5. Does being an intrapreneur increase or decrease the probability of being fired in a job or being declared redundant? Some of the best and most valued minds today are intrapreneurs, who tend to crave the benefits, freedoms and culture of smaller organizations. What initiatives can a larger company employ to keep these bright minds motivated, creative and satisfied?
On the flip side, what attributes would an intrapreneur search for in an ideal company?
6. How does the prisoners' dilemma or the soldiers' paradox relate to business? Discuss the merits or demerits of a top-down management structure as compared with a networked company with a flat organization structure. What is the value of teamwork and what does it really mean in the business world?
7. Can you tell the crucial difference between an entrepreneurial company and one that is owner-managed? What is the key difference? How do you create lasting value that is independent of the company founder? When you come to sell your business what are you actually selling: customer list, technology, intellectual property, unique business model, technique, personnel, relationships with suppliers, location, location, location, assets, R & D, cashflow, flexibility, company intranet, tooth to tail ratio, debt to equity, speed of execution, hierarchy, creativity, banking relationship, access to financing, relationships with government and regulatory agencies, connections, focus, goal setting, vision, receivables, liquidity, sales and distribution muscle, monopoly or oligopoly, price setting power, time in business, history, media profile, management team, ability to capitalize, other? Rank them in importance for entrepreneurial companies versus owner-managed business.
8. Can you think of examples of bootstrap marketing? What is the difference between bootstrap marketing and marketing?
9. Is market research important and how reliable is it? In the military, they use the expression: 'suck it and see'. How does that relate to market research? Should an entrepreneur be more like NYC cops: 'Bang! Bang! Bang! Halt!" or be more of a planner? What do you think is the right planning horizon for entrepreneurs- two years, five years, the next quarter?
10. What is the difference between marketing and selling? Who in your organization would be involved with sales- just the sales team, the President and CEO, your Board of Directors, your accountant, everyone?
11. How do you set prices: based on costs, based on the competition, based on what the market will bear, slightly less than the market price, depends on your market position (price taking versus price setting markets, monopoly, oligopoly, …), other? Discuss the merits of leaving money on the table for your clients? Can there be occasions when you raise prices and demand for your product or service increases?
12. Are you a linear thinker or non linear? Discuss the merits of each. Have you run into situations where you need to deal with ambiguity using fuzzy logic? Give an example.
13. Some people say: 'the harder you work, the luckier you get.' Discuss the role of luck and serendipitous events in determining success. Give an example.
14. How important is access to financing in starting a business? What are the alternatives if the bank and VCs turn you down? Can you give an example of bootstrap financing?
15. Do you think creativity is important when starting a new business? Is it more important for an entrepreneurial business as opposed to an owner-managed one? Or should both types of SMEs focus on simply doing things faster and cheaper than the competition but not worry about product or service uniqueness or competitive advantage?
16. What is more important- having great assets and products or having great people in determining new business success? Can you have a mediocre product or service and great people and still win? What about the reverse?
17. How do you identify the core business or core competencies of a new business? Discuss the merits of virtual and near-virtual companies as opposed to those vertically integrated ones with a 'not-invented-here' philosophy.
18. The internet is changing everything. Give an example of how the web has changed the business model for at least one industry.
19. Examine the ECQ Test. Comment on the efficacy of the questions and how they relate to entrepreneurial characteristics in your view.
20. Is being the first mover or, at least among the first movers, important to a new startup or can you enter a mature industry and succeed anyway?
21. Where can you find launch clients?
22. How do you build a personal network when you are new in business?
23. How can you improve the odds when cold calling?
24. Can you manage people as 'fire and forget missiles' or do you have to go back and check everything that your colleagues and employees and suppliers are doing?
25. What do you look for in new hires? Can you rank the qualities that you should be looking for in people who are joining a startup?
26. What is more likely to succeed-- a well capitalised, VC funded startup or a somewhat capital starved business?
27. Do you think that novel ideas or sound execution is more important to success?
28. There aren't many ideas as groundbreaking as, say, Priceline.com or eBay. Do you think you need to come up with an Archimedes type discovery (on how to measure density) or Einstein's Theory of Relativity (E = mc**2) to have success?
29. How important is good design, industrial design, architectural design, web design, marketing collateral design etc. to business success?
30. If you had to rank it, where do you think market-by-press-release fits into a marketing program. How do you get media coverage and turn it into sales?
Other essay questions may be selected by the student subject to approval of the lecturer.