What Every Entrepreneur Should be Doing Right Now (from Mark Cuban)

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore
CC BY-SA 3.0

I recently viewed a webinar hosted by Entrepreneurs’ Organization featuring serial entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban. The webinar promised to be a “candid discussion on the state of entrepreneurship during this challenging season.”

The webinar lived up to its billing, and I want to share some of Mr. Cuban’s entrepreneurship advice with you, including the following: 

• Communicate in a brutally honest and authentic way with your employees, vendors, and customers. They are all experiencing the same things you are right now.
• Ask questions of others, and solicit ideas from individuals at all levels of your organization. The mentality of “this is the way we’ve always done it” may no longer be appropriate. It’s time to innovate.
• Learn something new. Learn how your in-home platforms, such as Alexa, can help you with your work. Learn about artificial intelligence and robotics. They are the way of the future, and we need them to compete with other countries. If you can learn how to do it at a lower cost, you can ease your reliance on offshore resources and start to control your own destiny. 
• Rather than letting your fears paralyze you, turn them into motivation. 
• Become an expert in the risks businesses are currently facing. Whether it be your employees, vendors, or customers, as we begin reopening, people will be trusting businesses with their health. 
• Get creative and become an expert in social distance planning. Come up with new ideas to do business in ways that people want. How can you do something and still make it interesting? 
• Treating people equally doesn’t mean treating them the same. Everyone within your organization has a different skillset and background that can contribute to the success of the business. You just have to find the appropriate fit.

And lastly, what would advice from Mark Cuban be if it didn’t include a sports analogy? So remember that all the great ones are the first ones in and the last ones to leave. There is someone working 24 x 7 x 365 to kick your butt

A Call for More Open Innovation

The relationship among crisis, innovation, and change has always been intertwined.

Throughout history, crises have been pivotal in the development of society. Pandemic outbreaks have helped spur advances in medicine and public health, wars have driven technological innovations, and the 2008 financial crises spawned a “sharing economy,” making room for little-known companies, Uber and Airbnb.

I have no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic will shift the sands of our society. It is already happening. If you don’t believe me, take a look at some innovations already stemming out of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted by my fellow entreVIEW authors here, here, and here. 

As it has proven to be time after time throughout history, crisis is a catalyst for innovation — innovation that leads to change and the development of society. Crises drive companies to invest in another catalyst for innovation: collaboration. For example, at the end of March, Ford, 3M, and General Electric announced that they would work together with the United Auto Workers to build ventilators in Michigan using F-150 seat fans, portable battery packs, and 3D-printed parts. 

Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (Simon & Schuster, 2005)

As we sit in our homes in isolation in an attempt to “flatten the curve,” it’s helpful to remember that this is not the human race’s first rodeo.

A little over a century ago, in the midst of the world’s first experience of total war, a virulent virus raged through every corner of the globe, killing an estimated 100 million people. Most families were touched by the pandemic. My grandfather was spared from service in World War I because the second draft in which he would have been called up was canceled as a result of the pandemic. A strong and healthy young man, he later nearly died from the virus; his aunt suddenly came down with the influenza and was gone within a few days, leaving behind a bereaved husband and several young children.

Such experiences were commonplace, as Gina Kolata, a science journalist for the New York Times, recounts in this book. But this is more than just the story of the 1918 pandemic. Until relatively recently, scientists had no clue about the genetic makeup of the 1918 virus or what made it so dangerous. The search for the answers to these questions about the Spanish Flu, eerily similar to the frenetic search for knowledge about COVID-19 currently underway, makes up the heart of Kolata’s story.

Entrepreneurialism in the Age of COVID-19: from the Sublime to the Ridiculous

Necessity is the mother of invention. We’ve all heard that common phrase. When your need for something is imperative, you will find a way to get it.

While researchers around the globe scramble to meet obvious needs, including new or improved diagnostic tools and methods for detecting the COVID-19 virus, pharmaceutical preparations and devices for treating the disease and — ultimately — a vaccine to prevent it, others have responded to immediate and urgent needs by modifying or re-purposing existing devices and technology to address immediate and urgent concerns.

Methods of cleaning face masks to allow repeated use and modifications of ventilators for multi-patient support may have been developed as temporary fixes, but will likely evolve into longer-term solutions, now that we have experienced the need. Over time, inelegant “MacGyver fixes” birthed in crisis will be improved and institutionalized, but only because their usefulness or benefit was first proven through critical need.