W12 Reflection: Entrepreneurial Journal

This is a quote from the reading this week: "John May, a stock analyst for a U.S. investor service, pointed out that the pro forma earnings announcements by the top 100 NASDAQ companies in the first nine months of 2001 overstated actual audited profits by $100 billion. Even the audited accounts, it now seems, often made things appear better than they really were." This quote is addressing the dishonesty that happens at a high level that many of us probably don't even know about. If companies were more honest about their earnings the economy would not inflate as fast as it does. Since everyone think everything is more expensive, everything gets more expensive. If we were honest in the first place then things would inflate at the pace we expected them to. 

When addressing the existence of business, Charles said: "The purpose of a business, in other words, is not to make a profit, full stop. It is to make a profit so that the business can do something more or better." I have never started a business but the people that I know that have, I would say this is true. Most business owners have a reason in mind for why they started the business, and most of the time it isn't just to be able to say "I started a business" they want to use the profits of the business to fulfill the true dream. 

Handy offered the idea of measuring success in terms of outcomes. I do like this solution. If we were to focus on the outcome that comes from the profit of businesses then we would probably have different opinions on some businesses than we currently do. Businesses should use their profit for good, not necessarily for the benefit of others but for the good of their community, world, or the people they love. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

W07 Reflection: Entrepreneurial Journal

 Put first things first. I strive to be an optimistic person, and I have felt that this habit makes that easier. Put first things first is the third habit from Stephen Covey's "Seven Habit of Highly Effective People." The book says "t he heart of effective personal time management is to spend the maximum time possible doing important jobs in a non-urgent atmosphere that increases your efficiency." It is very easy for us to start getting ahead of ourselves and overthinking which leads to us to forget about the task at hand. I often found this happening with my friends during college when we were trying to make plans and something unexpected happens and we start trying to solve that problem before we even know what the options are. This is a low stress environment obviously, but the concept is the same. This is also how it helps with optimism, because instead of getting caught up in the problem you look for the solutions, and fairly often the solutions end up solv...
Read more

Week 09 Reflection: Entrepreneurial Journal

 Good is the enemy of great. While studying this week, this was a lesson I learned. It said that good is the enemy of great because it is easy to be good. This is not business related, but I played tennis in high school. I practiced two hours a day during the season, and often up to 6 hours during a day in the summer, but guess what. I was only good, I was not great. I placed third in the district and qualified for state where I would sometimes only win one match or maybe not win any. This is a confirmation that the people that are great at something they do are great because they put more time in than anyone else. I felt like I put in a lot of time, but the great were easily practicing tennis more than I was during the season and in the summer. I could make excuses, I lived in Rexburg, Idaho so it was hard to practice in the winter, neither of my parents played, but these are only excuses. If I wanted to be great I could have put more time in. This lessons teaches us the same with...
Read more

W06 Quiz: So You Want to Be an Entrepreneur?

 There was a quote from this week that has really stuck with me. The quote said:“The first and best victory is to conquer self; to be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile.” I liked this quote because it teaches us a few different lessons. One lesson I got from it is that we should not be too hard on ourselves. We should learn to conquer ourselves. To me this means we should learn it what ways we can be the most productive in conquering the things of this world. We all have different areas we struggle in, but we can learn how to best react to these areas. I, for example have difficulty in studying extra outside of typical assignments in school. Throughout my time in college I have learned that the bigger issue is after class I have a hard time studying or doing homework so I prefer to get up early and study and do homework before class. This also helps because then I have studied the material beforehand so class makes more sense.  The other thing that...
Read more