1.)
- What surprised you the most?
The thing that surprised me the most about Phil and his journey to success was his perseverance and willingness to keep working hard through all of the failures, disappointments, ups and downs, etc. Another thing that surpised me was the number of different jobs Mr. Knight had worked along the way of his journey.
- What about the entrepreneur did you most admire?
I think the biggest aspect that I most admired about Phil Knight was the passion and admiration he had for the grand idea of his business and how he was so invested in every detail of the people who enjoyed running as a hobby and a sport, and how he wanted to make an impact for those individuals who were just like him.
- What about the entrepreneur did you least admire?
If I had to pick one thing that I least admired about Mr. Knight, I guess it would have to be the way he didn't know how to communicate back with Jack Johnson, which was his first full-time employee for Blue Ribbon, and Phil didn't handle the work-management relationship well and kind of never made an effort at the beginning of the startup of Blue Ribbon.
- Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? If so, what did they do about it?
One point of adversity Phil experienced is that when he found out Onitsuka could not be trusted anymore, that lead him to search for a factory in Central Mexico, which the name of the factory was "Canada", and it was used for the manufacturing process.
2.) What competencies did you notice that the entrepreneur exhibited?
The competencies that I noticed from Mr. Knight is that he was very adventurous and courageous for taking a big leap of faith in coming up with an idea and dropping everyting to purse the main goal. Traveling all across the world to seek opportunities and information on how his business would succeed, highlights the amount of effort he poured into his idea.
3.) Identify at least one part of the reading that was confusing to you.
One part of the reading that was confusing to me is that I reall had a hard time understanding the decision making process of Phil Knight in making his old college track coach from Oregon, Bill Bowerman, his only partner of the business.
4.) If you were able to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, what would you ask? Why?
If I were able to ask Phil Knight two questions, my first question would be, "If you could go back in time and re-do this whole process over again from the start, what would you do differently?" My second question would be, "If Jack Johnson would've walked away from your proposal of opening a store on the east coast, what would have done as a backup plan to save the company?" I would ask Mr. Knight these two questions, because I feel like these would be questions that would make him reflect intensively and have to think about, rather than ask him a yes or no answer type of question.
5.) For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? Do you share that opinion?
I think Phil Knight's opinion of hard work was just to maintain a strong and positive mindset throughout the entire process, no matter what happened. In the beginning of the book, I was inspired to read that he gave himself the best advice to make his dream idea a reality. That advice was to have expectations that his idea was going to be successful and to let others think it's crazy and not going to workout, but in his mind he already knew it would be a success and he wouldn't stop until he got to that point in where he wanted to be.
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