W09 Reflection: Entrepreneurial Journal

 

The biggest thing that stuck out to me this week was Guy Kawaski’s talk. He talked about trust. I think that trust is something that has kind of gone down the drain in these last few years. I think that it becomes harder and harder to trust people every day, but I do think that there are still trustworthy people out there. He talked about the importance of trust when you are running a business. He gave examples of Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom, and some others. I think that it is definitely an interesting concept. He talked about how people can take advantage of these companies, but they usually don’t. For example, Amazon allows you to return things like books. He said that just about anybody can read a book and return it within the allotted time, but people don’t. Amazon goes out on a limb to trust people and in turn, people trust Amazon. I really like the idea of trusting people before they trust you. A thought that popped into my head was “well if I just trust everybody, I am going to get taken advantage of eventually.” Guy answered this immediately after I had that thought. He said something along the lines of most people are trustworthy, if you do business with somebody that wants to take advantage of you and cheat the system, you probably don’t want to associate with that person anyways. I really loved that answer. Another thing that really stuck out to me was his example of the two different types of people in the world. Therea are bakers and there are eaters. Eaters see a pie and think that they are going to take as much of it as possible. Whatever they take, nobody else gets. On the contrary, a baker sees a pie and thinks how can I make more pies, how can I make bigger pies, how can I make better pies? I think that it can be hard to be a baker, but it is something that will always help you, and society.