My Entrepreneurship Story

My sister, Jamila, is a serial entrepreneur, if not a successful one.  Jamila is constantly coming up with new ideas, whether it's board games to teach children about money, or a trying to start a property management business.  It's inspiring that she not only has these ideas, but follows through to try to make them a reality.  From seeing her ideas that didn't work out, I seen that a major danger for any enterprise is to much optimism in planning.

Planning is a good thing, but it can be overdone.  That is what I see happening with my sister, her plans are so specific that she can't adapt if something goes wrong.  She sacrifices flexibility, in her enterprises, and that seems to be a major contributor to them not working.  Large businesses can be, and sometimes need to be, rigid in their workings A new business, on the other hand, needs flexibility in order to deal with unexpected losses, where a larger one would be able to absorb them.

I'm hoping that this class will help me to be able to more effectively create entrepreneurial plans.  I have the exact opposite problem from my sister, I prefer to do very little planning beforehand.  One of the things I do at work is code macros for any spreadsheets we use, some of which are somewhat complex.  My code works, but because I don't plan it out beforehand its usually not as efficient as it could be. If that is translated into non-programming enterprises, sacrificing efficiency for flexibility can be every bit as dangerous as a lack of flexibility can be.