I must confess that I’m a child of the 80s. You give me Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, and Wham! and you’ve created the short list for the world’s best music.
MTV?
We couldn’t wait for the release of a new Michael Jackson video- that’s how songs were launched. I spent night watching Miami Vice, Wiseguy, Who’s the Boss, and of course, 90210.
My father, in his wisdom, showed his brilliance by offering to buy me a book for every A I got. In my early schooling, I got lots of As, and hence, lots of books. In the later schooling, well that’s a tale for another time.
One of the books that I grew up on, was this series that allowed you to pick a character, make decisions, and take different journeys based on the decisions you made.
Choose Your Own Adventure was analog gaming before Nintendo and Fortnite.
Those books were entertaining, creative, and opened my eyes to different places and things to do. It helped me dream a bit and to become the hero of my own story (or at least the story the authors created).
Last week, startup guru Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, wrote a post summarizing a speech he had witnessed from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. In that piece, he wrote about what he called Founder Mode.
Modern corporate leadership theory is centered around systems, processes, and ultimately people to do those systems and processes.
It’s finite- with a start, middle, and end. The job-to-be-done is always clear and good leader gets the people to do it a little better, a little faster, with a little more oomph each time, in order to increase sales and profits.
And the leader has to train, coach, and develop the people to do the work and “feel good about it”.
The problem is that this assumes that the story is already written. That the characters, narrative, and ending are predefined.
All of this we know to be false because the Earth has been around for four and a half billion years, modern humans have been here for two hundred thousands of years, and we’ve only just had the internet for sixty years.
And in the course of human history, we’ve had empires come and go, famines and epidemics, life and death, and the invention of the cronut. None of which could have been predicted or known ahead of time.
If you asked me in 1995, when I first moved to New York, if investing in pay phone companies would be a good investment, I would have emphatically said, Buy! I mean, pay phones were on every corner. They were indispensible to life. Ask any young person today what a pay phone is and they’ll stare at you blankly. Noone saw that coming.
And that’s where we get to Founders. You see, Founders do see it coming. A Founder and a founder-like leader, sees clearly the range of possible outcomes, and drives hard to get to the most ideal one right now, in an action-focused, iterative way. Action is the key.
There is no time for contemplation because survival is at stake, always, even if there are millions in the bank.
Founder Mode is like Choose Your Own Adventure and the Founder is the hero. The journey leads to the win.
The hero will face trials and tribulations and people and obstacles will come and go- that’s the journey. And ultimately the hero changes through the journey.
Is there anything wrong with this? I don’t think so. I think what’s spurred debate is that so many people are part of the machinery of life and don’t realize it.
They have jobs and are meant do to the thing in a repeatable way. They may say they want to grow and lead and be creative, but don’t understand that a different Adventure may be required than the one they chose, if they really want to Lead. They may not like the adventure that the Founder is taking them on- it’s too hard, it’s too fast, it’s too uncertain.
People really don’t like uncertain.
The hero’s journey is always uncertain.
Neither a Founder-led company or a professionally managed company with a hired C-suite is right or wrong. They are just different.
Working within them is very, very different. One big difference being ownership. Another is succession.
Choose your Adventure.
Today as I write this I’m sitting outside on a beautiful terrace in Barcelona. I would not have known that I’d here today, on this journey, ahead of time. I mean, yes I booked the place and I booked the ticket, but last year, 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have known. My career, my life, even with goals, the story wasn’t written yet until I wrote it.
I’m still writing it.
And I love it.
Thanks, Dad.
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