Entrepreneur Magazine October/November 2021

I BELIEVE WE experience change in four phases: panic, adaptation, new normal, and “wouldn’t go back.” The first three are about being forced to make changes we wouldn’t have previously considered. That last phase is when we realize how valuable these changes were. We start to say, “I wouldn’t want to go back to the way it was before.” As I’ve talked to entrepreneurs over the past year and a half, I’ve heard many “wouldn’t go back” stories. People found new opportunities and embraced new experiences. They reconsidered what they once believed was impossible. This is a powerful process but also a humbling one. I’m learning that for myself right now. Some background: My wife and I live with our two little boys in a small apartment in Brooklyn. But last March, as the…

In 1984, Michael Dell told his parents he was going to drop out of college to sell computers. They were concerned, to say the least. The gamble worked out, of course—his namesake company became one of the largest players in the computing space, then went public and made him a billionaire. But when, in 2013, Dell announced that he was going to take his company private, industry insiders and the press were even more skeptical than his parents back in the ’80s. That didn’t bother him. “I think most people are careful and risk-averse,” Dell says. “They don’t achieve their full potential because they don’t want to fail. And I think a big part of my success is that I wasn’t, you know, 50 percent smarter than everybody else or…

1/Build business before buzz. “It’s enticing to spend on sexy things like PR and events. But while awareness is great—and needed—you want to make sure you have the distribution set up to fully take advantage of the awareness. Early on, we spent on those things to build buzz, but we didn’t have enough retail distribution to support it. We jumped the gun a bit when we should have waited to make sure our full ecosystem was in place.” —JENNIFER ROSS, cofounder, Swoon 2/Say bye to the office. “We anonymously polled our employees about the return to office post-COVID, and every single person was either neutral or against going back full-time. The pandemic has proven that productivity doesn’t suffer when you’re working from home. Also, as a company based in L.A., where traffic is horrendous,…

As you read this, many of the people on your team may be plotting their escape. A recent Gallup poll found that 54 percent of workers are “psychologically unattached to their work and company”—and that makes them very hard to rally to your cause. Across the American economy, those disengaged employees translate into billions of dollars of losses. Why are they disengaged? Take your pick from a host of explanations. The pandemic inspired many people to reconsider their lives. Meanwhile, millennials are projected to make up 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025, and they have been known for a hyper focus on meaningful work that aligns with their beliefs (which isn’t something every job offers). Now Gen Z is entering the workforce and exhibits strong entrepreneurial ambitions; when EY…

Intel nearly failed in the 1980s, but its survival became a classic success story. The short version goes like this: Intel’s memory chip business was struggling, and its leaders, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, felt lost. One day, Grove asked Moore: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would we do?” Moore’s response: “Get out of the memory business.” That made their path clear. They laid off more than 7,000 people, shut down plants, pivoted into microprocessors, and saved Intel. Katy Milkman loves this story because it captures a key strategy for making change. She should know. She’s a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and she researches how to change behaviors in positive ways. (She also wrote a book…

Jason Alvarez-Cohen spends hours a day coding, and this summer was his crunch time. He was redesigning his app Popl, which helps people share their contact information digitally with others. As he sat at his desk working, he wanted to see as much of his code in front of him at once. That’s why he loves using a monitor that, to some, might look like it’s been accidentally tilted 90 degrees—which is no accident. “Having the vertical monitor to manage the code on Visual Studio Pro is key,” Alvarez-Cohen says. Vertical monitors are not new, but many entrepreneurs are still discovering their benefits. “They lay out a document better than a horizontal monitor does,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst and owner of the Enderle Group. Top monitor manufacturers are increasingly catering to this…