In business, and in life in general, the main thing is to protect yourself from yourself. You heard right — not from some villains or natural disasters, but from those forces that rage within each of us. “I am in complete control of my life,” as either an enlightened Buddha or a hopelessly naïve person might claim. Obeying an inner impulse, one makes fateful decisions, hunts for a particular deal, clings to a relationship, or gets caught up in another mess. And then, if he has the desire and strength, he rationalizes after the fact how and why it happened. This is evidenced by the negative pattern that has stubbornly emerged over the years. The pattern is one, but its forms are different, which makes it not so easy to catch its tail.
One entrepreneur has been fatally unlucky with partners. Each time, after the initial intensive growth of the company, disagreements arise between the partners and the joint business goes into a tailspin. Everyone — employees, investors and customers — is convinced of the genius of the other founder. But the constantly introduced advanced approaches and scrupulously described processes create a pseudo-order in the company, as the key decisions are delayed, the blurred zones of responsibility lead to conflicts, and the best employees burn out trying to improve anything. The third owner turns almost any project he touches into gold. But then he just as easily loses one valuable opportunity after another. The fourth, the fifteenth, the hundredth — each founder has his own signature move, and he regularly puts himself put on the blades.
When a systemic failure occurs for the first time, a person blames it on bad luck or the malicious intent of people. On the third or fifth time, a hunch comes in that it may be his own fault. And only by analyzing many of his decisions and their consequences, and then acting differently, is there a chance to neutralize the next impending failure. All founders go through this transformation. The only difference is the speed: for one of them each cycle takes six months, and for others it lasts ten or even twenty years.
Yours sincerely,
-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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