Read the Zeo, Inc. case study on pages 221-233 in the text. Zeo, founded by a group of college friends has developed a new sleep aid technology. Answer these questions:
What are the advantages/disadvantages of founding a company with friends?
How did the founders identify and entice stakeholders to join their board of directors?
Why did the founders seek a new CEO? What was the process they used to select the CEO? If this were you, would you do that or would you want to run the business yourself?
How did the role of each founder change as the business grew?
How does a company maintain its culture when it is professionalizing with a large top management team?
All papers should be written in the third person (he, he, it, and they). Make every effort not to shift to second person (you, your) as in, "When starting a company you need money." Try to avoid shifting to the first person (I, we) as well. It is distracting to the reader and bad style to shift persons in a paper-students often do it in the middle of a sentence.
Papers should be well researched. This is an upper level class, so the student may determine how many references are necessary. Students may use any source they wish: the Grantham on-line library; the Internet (an increasingly common resource for business research); and even Wikipedia for background research.
Wikipedia should not generally be cited because, by its own policy, it is not original work. However, most mature Wikipedia articles are well footnoted and the original work can be found, properly cited, in the page's bibliography at the bottom. Furthermore, should there be an occasion to cite Wikipedia, there is a link in the left column (Cite this page), which leads to citations in proper format for various academic styles.