Usually my business therapy begins with a diagnostic session, for which the founder and I set aside one intensive day. After the session, I prepare a detailed analytical report in which, among other things, I describe the founder’s dilemmas that I was able to discover. Some dilemmas are glaringly obvious, while others have to be deduced from the anxieties that deprive the founder of harmony and peace. As a rule, dilemmas count in the dozens. Yes, that’s right — not one or two, but dozens.
Subsequent analysis reveals the implicit connection between most dilemmas, which allows us to develop a strategy for solving them all. Each dilemma has a “face,” though the word “grimace” is more appropriate. A dilemma resembles a knot-some simpler, like a bow on a sneaker, and some more complex, like a knot of salt and time. Functionally, the knot greatly limits the degrees of freedom of the parts it has tied together. Both parts of the dilemma pull in different directions, but their desperate jerks only tighten the knot further. Alas, there is no forward motion. Efficiency tends to zero. Energy is dissipated into the void.
Every knot restricts the movement and steals the life resource. And if there are thirty or fifty such knots in the mind of the founder? Together they swaddle the person, as in hojojutsu, the Japanese martial art of tying an opponent with a rope. And that would be all right, but a medium-sized private business reflects its owner like a truce mirror. The bottleneck of such a business is not the market, the team, or the competitors, but the founder himself. If the entrepreneur, and consequently his business, lose speed in making and implementing decisions because of a critical mass of knots, the more dynamic and volatile the industry, the more vulnerable the business is. The good news is that untying the knots triggers a reverse process that unleashes a tremendous amount of opportunity and resources.
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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”Who are you and what do you do?"
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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