Week 3 Reading Reflection

Hey everyone,

This post will be discussing our latest weekly reading from our Entrepreneurship book written by Donald F. Kuratko. This week, we were asked to read assess Chapter 2, "The Entrepreneurial Mind-set in Individuals".

The biggest surprise for me that came from this week's reading came in Table 2.1 on the 42 characteristics that are often attributed to entrepreneurs. The reason that this surprised me was mainly due to the fact that there were a lot more qualities that defined successful entrepreneurs then I could imagine. Traits such as "sense of power", "toleration for ambiguity", and "sensitivity to others" were three descriptions of entrepreneurs that I had not yet heard. I was also surprised that ethics played such a large role within the free market and in the entrepreneurial world. Many decisions are influenced by a variety of ethical factors that I did not take into account before, as well as financial factors.

One part of the reading that was confusing for me was the part that talked about ethics and entrepreneurship. The concepts of nonrole, role failure, role distortion, and role assertion are concepts that I have never study and hence were confusing. Also, the ethical strategies and responsibilities section was pretty confusing because I did not understand if these were to be regular guidelines to follow (a document) or if these were just ethical standards that people with the company need to abide by.

If I could ask the author two questions these would be the two:

#1. Although many entrepreneurs are known for overcoming failure, what do you believe would be a reasonable amount of failure to deter an entrepreneur from his/her venture?

#2. If an entrepreneur was met with an unethical, yet legal dilemma regarding their business, do you believe they would fix this issue or merely turn a blind eye towards it because it is really not breaking any laws.

Finally, there was not anything that I did not agree with. However, I thought more should have been written on what molds the character and mindset of the entrepreneur rather than the ethical issues that entrepreneurs might face. Having said that, I still agreed with everything Kuratko had to say about ethics and entrepreneurs.