Different Aspects of Reflective Learning and How it Relates with Hinna Azeem Jewelry - Essay Example

? Contents Exexcutive Summary 3 Introduction 3 REPORT 4 Individual 4 Individual 2 7 Finding An Entrepreneur 7 Implementation: 7 Evaluation 8 Theoretical Analysis 8 Individual 3 9 Individual 4 10 Individual 5 12 CONCLUSION 14 References 15 Exexcutive Summary This report is based on an analysis of an entrepreneur with respect to reflective learning, Different aspects of reflective learning are discussed a lot with how it relates with Hinna Azeem jewelry, a sole proprietor brand. This report also reflects how our group worked both individually and collectively in order to complete the task. Reflective learning helps us improve our future by learning from the past. A good entrepreneur is one who not only posseses reflection skills but also enhances theses skills as time goes on. Hinna Azeem has proven herself as a entrepreneur who possesses good reflection skills. She has proved this phenomenon with the actions during the course of business. Introduction Hina Azeem, a jewelry brand named under the name of its very designer has become one famous brand. The brand started its life cycle in 2000. Like every business H Azeem grew slowly but steadily and within two years of the business achieved a stable growth. Hinna Azeem, the designer, was in the view of introducing jewelry at afforable price to the community. She not only wanted the jewlery to be affordable but also wanted it to be luxurious and stylish too. She believed that wearing nice and stylish jewelry gave a lot of psychological advantages to woman in which confidence was one major aspect. After introducing luxurious and stylish watches and jewelry for woman Hina Azeem has now planned to introduced products for men is well. She has planned to start off with gemstone cufflinks and custom made cufflinks and also offers after service products which no competitor offers at the moment. This shall give her an added advantage in the market. Her idea of pricing jewelry at affordable rates has ensured a large turnover which has led to profit making. Her business strategies and skills are impressive. She has outsourced her manufacturing to turkey, china and far off to ensure cheap labour. This tactics in return has ensured her to provide cheap and affordable prices. Instead of choosing a business strategy like that of APPLE and pricing her products highly and make it a fashion symbol, she has prefered to go about it in her own way. Even though now that has business has flourished and her brand named developed she has shown commitment to her initial strategy and has kept her price low. She has shown her sharpness when it comes to business at many occasions. Entering the men jewelry segment which is hardly saturated and offering extra value added services has kept her spot her. She has also started sales online, which shows her sharpness with regard to use of technology. Her skills and actions make her stand out to the rest of her competitors. She has been mentioned in many journal, which is a great achievement. She is a young but at the same time a prolific entrepreneur. REPORT Below is the report sections which reflect how each of us went about in fulfilling this task. What kinds of problems we went through and how each and every one of us played our part in completing the requirements of this module. The report has been laid down in such format so each individuals work and achievement can be analysed and understood. The conclusion is right at the end, and has been achieved not individually but as a team. Individual 1 Every entrepreneur has its own way and strategies to success. Some use their own beliefs while others may go from learning from experience of others. Some may go making new opportunities out of threats; some may simply wait and capitalize on them. We may even come across people who believe that entrepreneur are born rather than made. I personally think that people have their own view and we are to respect that fact. No one is an entrepreneur until and unless he actually enters the field of business. On his ladder to success he shall face many problems and learns from every experience. He rectifies his fault, builds on his opportunities and safeguards against any possible threats. Many renown philosophers and great business analysts has interpreted entrepreneurship in their own way. Entrepreneurship is a discipline and thus like any other type of discipline can be learned (Drucker 1985). Entrepreneurship expertise is a set of skills that may be acquired with the passage of time and committed practice (Read & Sarasvathy 2005). I personally have found this module interesting and decided to take it up due to the fact that my views didn’t follow any single analyst or business philosopher; in fact they are segregated between many different views and give a new dimension to things. This made me realize that the definition and the way of becoming an entrepreneur as not that of an absolute nature and constituted many different ways and views leading to a path of success. This made me more interested in this module as I wanted to learn more and more about becoming an entrepreneur and about the views of different people. I also had a curiosity to know about the experience of others and how they think the problem should be dealt with. A system called Entrepreneurial Development System, is based on the level of the required skills which an entrepreneur should have. This system was developed by Lichtenstein and Lyons (2001). This system makes us believe that it is very important not only to understand the business concept but also how to overcome any shortfall or threat. These skills ought to be of utmost importance and may be developed over time through work experience and tackling problems. My experience and knowledge has made me believe that effectuation is the process of how to tackling problem yet to come. Effectual logic is a non-predictive control while making decisions. That is avoiding the element of prediction while dealing with uncertain situations. (Sarasvathy, 2001). Many entrepreneurs have acted very sharply while taking decision about unpredictable future events. They may introduce discounts just to attract customers initially even though they have no idea whether the customer will return to them once the price goes back up. Our team work, understanding, knowledge and skill all contributed to the completion of this module. We all were involved in getting ourselves together in a team and deciding how to go about with things. Whether it was a question about selecting an entrepreneur or writing an report, we together worked in such a manner that predictions could be minimized and we are in full control of our actions. This was an example and what I learnt about effectual logic. We finally ended up with a report on H Azeem, a reknown jewelry designers and how her ways of business enhanced our understanding about business, entrepreneurship and reflective learning. Individual 2 Finding An Entrepreneur We are a team of five friends who were dedicatedly aiming for one objective, i.e finding the most successful and worthy enterprenuer amoung our circles. After finding some options we will shortlist best candidates who will be self made mans and would have flourished vastly in their fields. Later whomever agrees to let us interview them and willing to share their insights towards their struggle and steps to attaining such success will be chosen. Implementation: When I had to suggest some enterprenuers, I realized that all my collegues are doing job in some organization and none of them owns any company. However I came across few enterprenuers who were related to those collegeues and started seeking for their willingness to share their thoughts and views about how they became an enterprenuer with us. After exchanging a lot of email with the shorlisted enterprenuers, one was kind enough to find some time for us to interview him/her and was keen to share his experiences with us with the aim to help more and more people to become successful. Evaluation The enterprenuer, Ms.Hina Azeem agreed to give us time and our team instantly scheduled a meeting for the interview. We researched her work and using our study texts, each of us were able to jot down list of questions from each areas assigned to us, which would translate her practical struggle and harship to theoretical concepts. One member amoung five were given the list and was selected to conduct the interview which had the the best extempore communication and interogation skills. Theoretical Analysis According to the bird in hand theory of effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2007), entrepreneurs should start from who they are and what they know, thereby defining their profiles through experience, abilities and knowledge. Then they should think of whom they know, in order to consider potential stakeholders matching their own profiles for the venture to grow. Individual 3 Our future depends on our actions of the past. This is something I believe in deeply. Reflection can be seen as a mode of looking ahead while analysis what had occurred in the pass. No one can change the past or predict the future but analyzing you past surely gives you a better outlook on future. To many life is seen as a self-assessment of your past, learning from your experiences. Others put this statement in other words, saying life is a self-reflection process where we learn from our achievements, that we are proud of, and mistakes, that makes us feel bad and guilty. Entrepreneurship demands one to analyze his past experience and all the criticism sought during his actions and learn from it so his skills can be enhanced. A great business philosopher Politis (2005) states that one’s ability to apply knowledge and concepts from his past experience to his current situation plays a really vital in fact a pivotal role in the development of his entrepreneurial skills and entrepreneurial learning. The main objective of this module was the reasoning of success and failures of entrepreneurs. The best way for this to be done was to emphasize and analyses the differentiation between casual and effectual logic. This was to be done by applying theory to practice. Reflection on my entrepreneurial learning process was of utmost importance and for this I chose to apply The Gibbs Reflective cycle. I believe this was a key to analyze many critical things of my project. These critical things included how to prepare a questionnaire for interview, how to make the interview successful and also why was a certain group of stakeholders being selected and how did I manage to find out their weaknesses and strengths. Not only was this to address. I had to also manage communicating between the group as a whole and helping one another out. We also had to link work of one another and had to finally put in all in one shape for the completion of this work Individual 4 The task assigned to me was to brief the about reflective learning and why is it so important. During my research about the topic I came across many views of different people who have researched, analyzed and looked into reflective learning and its aspects closely. Reflective learning helps not only students but also practitioners to make links between practice and theory . Reflective learning refers to the learning from ones experiences and using it to improve your future. Reflective learning may be made form ou experiences or even the experience of others (Gibbs,1988) There is no compulsion to have somme sought of experience to learn. People may forget an experience rather then learn it. Its due to the thinking that is developed through reflection that concepts are generated and with the help of these concepts future events can be handled really effectively (Gibbs,1988) Reflection skills are a vital aspect of key elements in all business planning. Reflections skills may be enhanced by analysing experiences and improving future actions on the basis of the performed analysis. Discussing ones experience with others is a good way to start improving your skills of reflection. (Billard,B.et al,1991) Out of the lof most educators had the belief that reflection was an important aspect of the learning process even when no supporting data was available. It is believed that reflection leads to growth of individuals in every aspect whether it be personal, moral, emotional, pyschological.(Biggs,1999) Reflection not only helps in identifying ones values and beliefs if also helps in understanding ones strength and weaknesses. Reflection helps acknowledge ones fears and shows how to improve ones self. Reflection also creates self awareness which no doubt is a really positive change. Furthermore reflection identifies approaches and strategies that have worked well in the past and helpd in the growth of the business.(Taylor,G.1989) One step ahead of reflection in critical reflection. This is the process ofanalysing and questioning experiences through a large context of things (Murray, Kujundzic, 2005). They are four activites that are realted to critical reflection(Brookfield 1988) . These four activities are, namely, assumption analysis, contextual awareness, reflective skepticism and imaginative speculation. All four of these are inter related and enhance our skills towards the reflection learning process. After carrying out the research, I firstly absorbed the concepts of reflective learning and then went on helping my team members understanding what it was actually all about. Although the explaining process was a touch difficult initially but later on it became easier for me. I realised that by helping others with the concepts of reflective learning I actually clarified my ownself about the meanings and implications of reflective learning. Individual 5 The first assignment was to split this task into equal parts so all of us could be offloaded of heavy work but at the same time contribute towards the project. We first asked each other our preferences and what part would each of us prefer to do. Communicating in a team made things easy for us as most of us managed doing that piece of work they preferred the most. I let the others choose and finally was left to do the company review. I was glad to do this part. Firstly because it would enhance my knowledge about an entrepreneur, as this was what this module fascinated me about. Secondly me doing well, meant the group doing well, which put extra responsibility on me to carry out the work with much more commitment and hardwork. One we finally decided who had to do what, here arose a sense of mistrust among us as we had never worked together in a team before. Even though I really wanted to trust my team members I couldn’t simply due to the fact that I had never worked with them before. Goel & Karri and Sarasvathy and Dew (2008) came to my mind. While the former claimed a link between over trust and effectual logic, the later stateted that intelligent Altruism was inevitable in networks that were effectual due to the fact that the stakeholder were only on board if they make a real commitment. After analysing the situation I believed that the link of over trust and effectual logic was not applicable in this case as the commitment by my team members wasn’t out of choice it was actually imposed on them as it being the module requirement. We all came together to discuss how we managed out work and what had we done. We went through each others work, listened to each other and told each other our concerns. As this group was filled with people I hardly knew before and came together due to the requirement of the module I decided not to raise any concerns at the spot. This was due to the fact that I thought that someone might get offended or not like me critising his work. So I prefered to raise my concerns through email. By this method all of us could let each other know what are the shortcoming and no one being offended at the same time. This was because this mode was much formal than any other. We wrote each other emails and gave each other feedback of the work being carried out. Communication is regarded as a vital skill especially when you are new to an environment. There is no doubt that I leant something new while going through this situation. It was that I figured a way how to communicate to people who are related to a task, its stakeholders, in a new and uncomfortable environment to get better results out of them and as a group as a whole. As days went on we produced our work and made adjustments respecting each others feedback. Another thing that was a matter of concern was that a we were to give a presentation to a someone which was not of person who we had interacted before. An external examiner. I was really scared of this fact. I had no idea what was he to ask and as confused about my delivery of presentation. After initially being scared I realised that this weakness of mine made me more keen to perform and helped me over come any doubts and confusion caused initially. I was coping with a liability of a new situation and reduced the problem coming in the way. This is a skill of an entrepreneur according to Aldrich and Auster (1986) Completing the MOA for the report ensured that we would carry out the task in an effective manner. They way we communicated, came over mistrust, showed commitment regards out work and helped each other where required reflected the skills of an entrepreneur and helped us enhance our entrepreneurial learning. CONCLUSION During carrying out this task they was many things that led to developing and enhancing our knowledge towards entrepreneurial learning. Foremost after analysing Hinna Azeem Jewelry, we understand that each and every business takes its time to develop and one may hope but shouldn’t expect a stable and positive growth from day one. Secondly, the philosophy of going to the root of the business and improving it, that is, the manufacturing has been tarnished. Like Hinna Azeem one can outsource the manufacturing and fully focus on her customers and their needs. An important and pivotal aspect was that of being aware of the market situation and offering such products that not only adds values but also increases ones business worth always comes in handy. An other important thing that we have learnt during this research and analysis is one should regularly analyse its own market environment and expansion should be not rushed. A segment of business should be slowly and steadily built and once when it has a stable growth and yields profits then another segment should be started up. Some entrepreneur make a major blunder by offering so much at once and than fading away as they can’t keep up neither to the expectation nor quality. 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Wertenbroch, A.; Nabeth, T. (2000). Advanced Learning Approaches & Technologies: The CALT Perspective. http://www.insead.fr/CALT/Publication/CALTReport/calt-perspective.pdf Read More