Pharmapacks.com has partnered with the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart, becoming one of their top health and beauty product sellers. But Andrew Vagenas, cofounder of the e-commerce retail website, admits that he was a “micromanager” when the company initially started to scale. He wanted a say in every decision and action undertaken by his employees.
Once people learn that I work in the field of entrepreneurship, it doesn’t take long before they ask the familiar question, “so do you like Shark Tank?” I respond that what I like most is the fact that it has made entrepreneurship a family-friendly word.
For many people, introversion can be a badge of shame. Attributes such as quiet or shy are looked down upon as weaker characteristics. They’re certainly not the qualities possessed by successful entrepreneurs. Oh, but that’s where our natural instincts can be wrong.
The 8-hour workday was an innovative idea at its start. Back in the boom of the Industrial Revolution, workers could be expected to put in 10-16 hours a day (and that was a minimum). Soon, Henry Ford came along with his own theories about the American workplace, arriving at a theory to shorten the workday to eight hours a day and 40 hours a week. This completely changed the game during the early 1900s, giving workers more time for leisure and time spent outside the office. The problem now is, this is the last time we’ve really innovated on this construct.
