ADMN4101- Durham S24 - Thinking About Management - Professional Biography of a Manager Assignment - Guidelines and Requirements This assignment allows cach student to study the career of an entreprencur, with a focus on the person's managerial decisions and actions. The goal is to understand the decisions made by those who start businesses as they face challenges and manage through them as the business grows (or declines). Itis a biography, but should be written from the perspective of a journalist interviewing or studying an entrepreneur. The student selects the individual to write about. The one requirement is that the individual is an entrepreneur under the definition of 'someone who has started and grown a business'. The purpose of this criteria is to observe how the individual navigates the pathways of business creation. (This can be compared to the final assignment where the goal is to observe large, established organizations.) The individual may be someone who, decades ago, started a business that has grown to a large organization, it may be an individual who started a business that remains an SME (small to medium enterprise) or it may be an individual who has started a company recently. Individuals who start social ventures are also acceptable as subjects. Approval of a subject individual is not required, however, please do NOT write about Elon Musk. Before committing to a topic, students should ensure that there is sufficient information available to complete the paper. Information may be drawn from any form of secondary source, including interviews of the entrepreneur. Interviews available in print or video are acceptable, as are business publications, company records, academic publications, industry sources and books. Drawing from a variety of sources is encouraged to demonstrate academic rigour even if the primary source of information comes from interviewing the entrepreneur. (NOTE: You may interview the subject of your biography, if the entrepreneur agrees to be interviewed. See Appendix | for guidelines and requirements on interviewing people for this assignment.) Recommended format: Introduction - A brief paragraph (not more than 150 words) to identify the subject of the biography. Write this as Ihough the reader has never heard of the subject. Note the industry enwronmem the person works in, the company(s) they have started including product area. i (such as parents, education) - this type of information seldom appears in a professional biography. However, you may include the person's career or life goals or motivations, especially for starting their business. Body of paper - Select three key incidents, developments or issues faced by the entrepreneur in their professional life. Describe the incident in sufficient detail that it is clear why a decision was required. Many people will say 'l decided to..." and describe the course of action, without indicating the basis behind the decision or the alternatives. These should be in your paper. For each incident, describe the decision point, the options and the basis for the solution they chose. This is where your analysis will enter the paper. Include reflection on the subject's personal motivations, ethical aspects of the issue and decision, and business strategy for each issue. Ideally, the issues discussed will be sequential, or connected in some way that can be seen to connect the decision-making process of the subject, or the person's growth in managerial skills. Conclusion - Include a summary statement of the subject's entrepreneurial pursuits. Incorporate what you have learned from the decisions made by the subject (not what you learned about the subject), or about the decision-making process used in your conclusion of the paper. This is an individual assignment. Students may write on the same topic as other students, however, each paper must clearly be an independent work. As the subject matter has a good deal of breadth and students will select from a wide range of information to present, it is expecied that two papers on the same topic will be quite different. The biography should be no more than 1,000 words, not including titles and references. Note that figures are not usually included in biographies. Appendices are not allowed. Sections of text beyond the word limit may not be read or included in grading. In-text citations should be used for all information in the paper that is not the student's original thought. Footnotes or endnotes are an acceptable format for the in-text citation. APA style should be used for the format of the references. "l:ls biography should be written in first person, making it clear that you are writing about the subject (1.e. either ' have the opportunity to interview Mr. X or read extensively about Ms. Y_..). The concluding paragraph should be in first person as it reflects what you have learned. Submissions are to be made in the appropriate folder in Blackboard. Documents should be in MS word format or PDF. It is the student's responsibility to ensure the submission is correctly loaded and to retain a backup copy