Coming Of Age

Entrepreneurs and business experts discuss how the 80s changed the way they think about business.

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How the events of the past decade have changed the way we think about business

Steve Mariotti -- most of you have never heard of him. Unlike John Sculley, Fred Smith, Bill Gates, David Halberstam, Don Burr, and many of the dozens of other people we've interviewed over the past few months, Mariotti is not famous. It's not likely he'll ever be. But we asked him the question our anniversary issue is built around -- the same question we asked everyone else: "How have the events of the past 10 years changed the way that you personally think about business?" We loved what he said.

Mariotti's decade doesn't look much like the one you read about in The Wall Street Journal. He doesn't discuss the globalization of competition, the fragmentation of markets, the revolution in technology, or the wilting of the Fortune 500. He does deal with the entrepreneurial boom, but in terms of the South Bronx, and 17-year-old kids, and companies that clean houses, sell T-shirts, and produce rap music. For Mariotti the past 10 years have meant a trip from grade-7 financial analyst at Ford Motor Co. to launcher of new businesses at urban public schools. Mariotti's decade doesn't look a lot like Sculley's or Smith's or Burr's.

But that's all right. Because in the end what Mariotti talked about was at the center of everything we heard. He told us how business feels -- how the experience of doing business has a radical effect on what we think of ourselves and the world. He talked about business as a tool, an agent of change in that world. And most of all, he talked about what doing business means -- how today business seems more widely defined than before, is more all-encompassing, harder to segregate from our family lives, community lives, inner lives. How we look to our work for self-esteem and reasons to be hopeful. How we demand that business matter.

In the pages that follow, you'll find a selection of the company builders, policymakers, and professional observers we interviewed. They've wrestled with these themes and others. You'll also find, in our attempt to reprise those 10 years of change: In Search of Excellence coauthor Tom Peters telling how he himself has changed, trading one set of role models for another ("Doubting Thomas," April 1989, [Article link]); a collection of answers to the question INC. staffers are most often asked ("My Favorite Company," [Article link]); the executive lineup we'd put together if we could create our fantasy start-up ("Dream Team," [Article link]); an interview with our pick for Entrepreneur of the Decade ([Article link]); and the story of a real start-up that shows how completely the entrepreneurial world has been transformed ("With a Little Help from His Friends," [Article link]).

We hope you'll find in reading these pieces what we found in doing them: an explicit reminder of the energy, diversity, and imaginative power of the people we write about. -- The Editors

BEN COHEN

38, cofounder, Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc.

I'm a lot more aware of the power of business to act as a force for social change now.

When we first started Ben & Jerry's, we had no intention of going into "business" -- we saw it as pretty much a lark. Then there came a time about five years ago when Jerry and I noticed that we were no longer scooping ice-cream cones behind a counter and working in the ice-cream shop, that we were bosses and administrators who were spending a lot of time on the phone and doing paperwork. When we were introduced to people and they asked, what do you do? there came a point when the answer was not, "I'm a homemade ice-cream shop owner," but "I'm a businessman." And I had a hard time mouthing those words.

Jerry and I were businessmen. It was a disheartening realization. Growing up in the 1960s, we felt business was something that tended to exploit the community and its employees in order to achieve maximized financial returns. So when we came to that realization, we came very close to selling the business and getting out of that racket. We had no intention of being businessmen; we wanted to be ice-cream men.

"Ten years ago my business consisted of my partner and me. I was trying to work in a way that fit with how I saw the world and wanted to live. It seemed that a business based on as much personal involvement and lack of hype as ours would never reach a level of national notice. But that didn't matter to me then. And anyway, I was wrong."

-- ANNE ROBINSON, 40, cofounder/president/CEO, Windham Hill Productions Inc.

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