Today was our first company visit, and while the experience was relatively overwhelming, I feel that I learned a lot about the business world. Ernst & Young was overwhelming for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that my hometown has an ordinance against buildings over two stories. Furthermore, we received an absolute wealth of information, a lot of which was quite difficult for me to follow as someone who has not yet had an economics course. With all of that being said, I did come away with some fairly profound takeaways with regards to entrepreneurship.

First of all, and most profound to me, the speakers at Ernst & Young talked a lot about their team structure. Their business structure encourages conversation between different levels of employees, which makes everyone feel as though their opinions matter. This coincides with the idea of constructive criticism that Professor Lada has argued is positive within a workplace environment. An important consequence of this structure is an increase in diversity of thought, which from an entrepreneurial standpoint, creates greater scrutiny of ideas, company policies, heuristics, and so on. Moreover, this openness helps create a culture of collaboration, which brings me to my second extremely important takeaway from my visit.

Ernst & Young is all about their culture, and while I have always understood the idea of creating a culture within a company, I have never exactly thought of it as an emergent quality of a firm. In my mind, culture was something set predominantly by those at the top, and while it is certainly the responsibility of an entrepreneur to be a good example for his or her employees, the employees themselves have a massive effect on the culture of a firm with regards to the day to day business of that firm. This outlook really helped me understand the importance of lower-level employees in a firm: without disciples of the culture at all levels of a firm, the culture can become muddied, thereby affecting the effectiveness of the firm.

I will admit that I was skeptical of this company visit at first; I was extremely tired, not accustomed to a business environment, and did not feel like I had much value to add in terms of conversation or questions for the Ernst & Young employees. With that being said, the more I reflect on the experience, the more I think I am starting to understand entrepreneurship, as well as its relation to managing in complex environments, and I hope to continue growing through reflection over the coming days.