Week 12 Reading Reflection

     In chapter 13 of Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process, and Practice, I was interested to learn about the stages needed to achieve growth. Before reading this chapter I was already familiar with strategic planning because it was covered in the introduction to management class I took last semester. I personally like Professor Archambeau’s explanation of the strategy matrix model better than Kuratko because I felt that she was more clear and used symbols to illustrate each box in the matrix.

     I found some of the unique managerial concerns of growing ventures to be a little confusing. I understood the first part of the chapter best since I have previous knowledge in strategic planning, but Kuratko lost me a little when he started talking about growing ventures. Overall I really liked the use of tables in this chapter to help summarize some of Kuratko’s talking points.

     I would be interested in knowing how to avoid the one-person-band syndrome. Sometimes I find it easier to do something by myself instead of delegate tasks to other people because I know that I can count on myself to get things done. Something else I would be interested in knowing is which form of failure is hardest to overcome. When I first read this section the different types of failure intrigued me. I imagine that uncontrollable failure might be the hardest to overcome since it is uncontrollable but I think personal failure would impact the individual the hardest.

     In this chapter I didn’t disagree with anything that the author said. I thought that for the most part it was very straightforward and easy to comprehend. I only had trouble following one section but overall the tables helped to clear things up.