Sample Essay Questions—Entrepreneurialist
Culture 2008
Suggested Student Essay Questions:
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 capitalized, 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?
31. What is more
important a business model or a business plan?
32. What is more
important goal setting or a business plan?
33. Why is flexibility important to an
entrepreneur?
34. Trading assets is a way to build cash
but it is also risky—compare the merits of a build and
hold entrepreneur with a serial entrepreneur? Can lightning strike twice (or
three or more times)?
35. Show how even a service business can
become a scaleable enterprise.
36. What is the key to explaining your
value proposition in less than two minutes? How do you make an effective
‘elevator pitch’?
37. Do you need to be able to sell to be
successful as an entrepreneur or can you leave that to others to do?
38. How do you find your first three
clients?
39. Selling is telling—explain.
40. How do you know when to give up on a
business?
41. How can you stop YOURSELF from spinning
your wheels and get on with the crucial things in business?
42. How can you deal with stress and
uncertainty?
43. What is a personal business for life
and how would you go about finding one for yourself?
44. Can you become more creative and
innovative and how would you do this?
45.
Can you learn from others and adopt best practices wherever they come
from?
46. Discuss whether ideas
should be free or protected by copyright, trademark, patent or trade secret? Which approach would you take?
47. In
entrepreneurship, is it legals first and business second or vice versa?
48. Is it really better to ask for
forgiveness or beg for permission?
49. Guerrilla marketing and earned media
can sometimes be a grey moral area. Discuss.
50. What is the difference between being
rich and being wealthy? Discuss.
51. Some entrepreneurs think that their
priorities should be:
Priority # 1: TAKE CARE OF THE BUSINESS.
Priority # 2: TAKE CARE OF YOUR FAMILY.
Priority # 3: TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.
Discuss.
52. Are the goals of higher profitability
and environmental sustainability necessarily mutually exclusive?
53. Should the UN be
encouraged to establish a day celebrating the role of entrepreneurs and, if so,
why?
54. Why do people choose to become
entrepreneurs?
a. They want to make more money.
b. They have no other alternatives.
c. They want to work fewer hours.
d. They want to have flexible work hours.
e. They believe they can create more
interesting work for themselves than others can create for them.
Discuss.
55. Why is the best partnership, no
partnership or as someone once said: “If God had wanted a partner, He would
have one”?
Other essay questions may be selected by the student subject to approval of the lecturer.
A few simple things to remember when writing your essay:
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 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, g) an
interesting source of Bootstrap Capital, h) some unique example of differentiated
value, i) an interesting example of reversing out the
work using the Internet or creating custom outputs from standard inputs, k) a
new business model that you want to analyze, l) a compelling value proposition,
m) finding pre-launch or launch clients, n) excellent execution and
out-executing the competition, o) making up your own rules, p) providing
outstanding leadership, q) creating a sustainable competitive advantage, r) an
example of how someone set and achieved their goals in business and what it
took to do that.
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