W09 Reflection:Entrepreneurial Journal

 I think I liked the video from Guy Kawasaki.  I tend to gravitate towards his messages and teachings because his book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" is the first book that I read on my own outside of school/church purposes.

In his video, he talks about trust and how it works.  Something that I never really thought of before is if we want to be trusted by others, we must trust them first.  He shares an example of Zappos.  I personally haven't heard of them, but I guess they are a women's shoe company.  He shares an example of how Zappos was able to get women to buy their shoes online without trying them on.  Zappos "trusted" their customers by saying that they would pay for shipping and handling both ways.  So if their customers ended up not liking the shoes that they tried on, they could ship them back no cost to them and they would receive their money back.  That "trust" took all the risk out of buying shoes online, and it was a big success.  

I think that Carly Fiorina also had some good points that she shared.  Her main message was that "Leadership is about 3 things: capability, collaboration, and character."  Her message about capability is measured by your ability to ask questions and then be able to actually listen and digest the answer that you receive.  If you are not able to ask the right questions, or if you're not able to understand the answer that you receive, you are going to be extremely limited as a leader.  

I think that this last message is something that I have been able to see as a football coach.  I am a volunteer football coach during my free time, and something that I see all the time is the situation of "You don't know what you don't know."  A lot of coaches and players think that they understand everything, or that they have a complete grasp of every concept in football.  That is something that is couldn't be further from the truth.  Football is chess on steroids.  There are so many different strategies and coaching points that most players/coaches don't understand.  Even most players don't understand how complicated it is because they only do one job out of 11 players.  They don't need to understand the why.  You can see this in interviews.  They don't even understand what questions they need to be asking.  In this case, it's important to be humble and be able to ask questions and LISTEN to the input that you will receive.  That is the difference between good and great coaches/players.  

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