Small Talk

How has your thinking on entrepreneurship changed in the past 10 years?

Small Business Is Cool Now
Small business is cool now, and I don't mean that lightly. It wasn't so long ago that our heroes were lawyers or journalists like Woodward and Bernstein. But now things are different. Lawyers are no longer seen as a force for good. People are seeing that the stuff making our lives better comes from business more often than it comes from government.

It used to be that there was an exciting part of big business that attracted people. But today it's the reverse: small companies are the heroes. It used to be that business schools turned out investment bankers and consultants, but now the entrepreneurs get the attention.

Only a few years back, small businesses were trying to act like big businesses. Well, now big businesses are trying to act like small businesses. Small companies are experiencing great victories.

-- Scott Cook, cofounder and chairman of the board of Intuit Inc., a provider of financial software and services in Mountain View, Calif.

As a person who grew up in a mostly blue collar community, where my parents were products of the postwar era, all I heard at the time was "Get a job with a big company, a secure company. Even get a civil service job." Being an entrepreneur is much more culturally acceptable now than it was. It's a worthwhile, laudable, realistic career alternative for so many people. Today people say, "I want to work in an entrepreneurial environment." Twenty years ago, believe me, you didn't have many people saying that.

-- Jim McCann, president of 1-800-FLOWERS, a florist and gift company, with headquarters in Westbury, N.Y.

I know more students who have decided to "go entrepreneur" than specialize in anything else in business school. There's a lot of interest in our organization. Everyone -- from architecture majors to computer-engineering majors -- wants to know how to start up his or her own business.

-- Ursula Hessenflow, president of the USC Entrepreneurs Society, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

When I started in this business 25 years ago, business schools were training people mainly for the Fortune 500. That's simply not the case anymore. Younger people today are interested in getting into smaller enterprises -- not necessarily in founding them but in being a part of them. That's quite positive for smaller-scale enterprises and for the innovative process.

-- Patricia M. Cloherty, president, Patricof & Co. Ventures, an international venture-capital firm, with offices in the United States and Europe

Entrepreneurship has become a much more viable and socially acceptable career option than it used to be. Today it's at least as feasible as medicine or law. It opens up possibilities for older people as well. We've had a steady accretion of support structures for entrepreneurial ventures. We've got more risk capital and more private investors who are comfortable with such ventures. And we know much more about the process of starting a company. Before, it was almost like alchemy. Essentially we've democratized the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur in this country.

In the future we'll see people broadening the conventional definitions of entrepreneurship to address economic self-sufficiency. We're going to see people becoming entrepreneurial by buying companies. The "buy-a-company" route is especially viable for the 50-year-olds who were booted out of Fortune 500 companies. They know how to run something. We'll be seeing more corporate refugees going off and setting up their own colonies.

-- Jim Collins, management educator and coauthor of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperBusiness, 1994)

Small-business owners have come to realize that they must take the time to be involved politically. In the last Congress, for the first time in more than 40 years, the freshman class had more people with business backgrounds than with legal backgrounds. In the future you'll see more small-business owners willing to become volunteer legislators, to serve and then come home. There's a feeling around America that maybe someone who's made a payroll can do a better job of balancing the government's books than someone who's never signed the front of a paycheck. It's the ultimate sacrifice for small-business owners to take time away from the business because it's their blood, their life. But it is starting to happen.

-- Jack Faris, president and CEO, National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business advocacy group

The World Will Beat a Path to Your Door
The most important story of the past 10 years is the same one that will dominate the next 10: the globalization of small business. Unlike ever before, a small business now can be an international player. What'll be different in the near future is that a small business will have to be an international player. Any businessperson who's used a passport has seen the change. Travel is easier, faster, and cheaper; and new tools and amenities have made travel time useful. Even more responsible for the international boom are the rapidly decreasing costs and rising quality of communications -- trends that will be accelerated by the Internet.

But the single biggest reason we'll all have to go global is that English has emerged as the common language of international commerce -- which means that the most formidable market barriers are gone. Five years ago when I went to Holland, Sweden, or France, I had to plan on having a translator -- and forget about Asia. Now I can go to Europe or to Tokyo and count on the average businessperson to speak English. Recently I was at a convention of Common MarketÑcountry representatives who could claim 17 different native tongues, and what language was the conversation held in? English. It's everywhere. They've had to make the leap because it was either communicate or starve.