Entrepreneur Magazine April/May 2022

WE’RE ALL looking for an edge. To find it, we often become obsessed with efficiency—searching for ways to move faster and produce more. But is it possible to be too efficient? What if, paradoxically, our pursuit of efficiency makes us less efficient? That’s a not-so-crazy idea I heard recently from Edward Tenner, a distinguished scholar at the Smithsonian Institution and the author of a book called The Efficiency Paradox. He is not opposed to efficiency—after all, there’s nothing productive about being sloppy and disorganized. But he does offer caution to those who glorify it. “Innovation very seldom can be done efficiently,” he tells me. “There are always lots of mistakes involved. So if you have software or any other arrangement that optimizes things too soon, you might be passing up the biggest opportunity.” By…

Why does my family not like me right now? That was the gut-wrenching question Terry Crews found himself asking one night, 12 years ago. The professional athlete, actor, and entrepreneur had worked himself to the bone—and in certain ways, he’d gotten everything he wanted. He’d been married for decades and had five beautiful kids. After a seven-year career in the NFL, he’d found success on the big and small screen, starring in TV shows like Everybody Hates Chris and movies like Get Smart and The Longest Yard. Now he’s also the CEO of virtual production company Amen&Amen, host of America’s Got Talent, and designs furniture for Bernhardt Design. But on that night in 2010, Crews was forced to admit that everything was not okay. Painful experiences from his past were catching up…

1/ Try to understand people, not change them. “In a previous role, one of my team members was motivated by competition, which created friction with others. Trying to change someone’s way of seeing the world is an exercise in futility, so rather than judge their means of motivation, I refocused their competitiveness on personal performance. That way, they could tap into their desire to achieve without making others feel challenged or dominated.” —KATE LUBENESKY, president, W&P 2/ To avoid confusion, recap. “As a global brand, we do business in different regions and deal with language barriers as well as cultural subtleties. In the past, things have definitely been lost in translation. We’ve learned to see the humor in it, rather than getting unnecessarily frustrated—which never helps anyway. We use simple tactics like email follow-ups.…

Plastic is not created equally,” says Heidi Kujawa, CEO of ByFusion. “It’s super complex, which is why this problem is really broken.” The very short version of the problem goes like this: Despite all those triangle-arrow recycling symbols on the bottom of your bottles, most plastic is not recyclable. And the stuff that is often isn’t recycled anyway, because the process is dirty and cumbersome. Which means your recycling bin may be emptied into a landfill. Kujawa wants to fix this. She had a successful career in entertainment and tech, but was looking to do something more meaningful. Around 2015, she heard about a company that had developed an interesting concept: It smushed old plastic into blocks, which could be used as construction material instead of concrete or bricks. “They had a…

How do you foster an environment that sparks innovation? That’s the million-dollar question—and for a long time, the most common strategy has been for capable leaders to hire sharp minds and then assemble them into effective teams. But as it turns out, some of the greatest innovation happening today begins quite differently: Leaders hire sharp minds, but they do not assemble them into teams. So who does? The team members themselves. Teams arranged this way are called many different things: “empowered,” “self-directed,” or “autonomous.” Whatever they’re called, surveys have found that 79% of Fortune 1000 companies and 81% of manufacturing organizations currently deploy some version of this principle. The implementation may look different, but the general idea is the same: These companies encourage their employees to band together on their own and…

The world doesn’t need another candle brand,” people told Abigail Cook Stone, a former art buyer for Ralph Lauren. But Cook Stone disagreed. She was an avid candle consumer, and she’d looked high and low for one that was aesthetically exciting, smelled more like vine-covered pergolas and minty cocktails than motel bathrooms, and was sold at a price that she and her friends could afford. As far as she could tell, no such candle existed. At the time this revelation came to Cook Stone, she was making her way through Columbia University’s business school while working at the seed-stage fund Founder Collective. After graduating in 2016, she and her now-fiancé, Sayyid Markar, started an online candle brand called Otherland. But that’s when they got a whiff of trouble. “It was like, how…