Why Do You Need To Have Both A Manager And A Founder’s Mentality?
Edition #138
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
"Hire Good People And Give Them Room To Do Their Jobs."…. And The Results Were Disastrous!
Paul Graham wrote a provocative article about Founder Mode after hearing Airbnb Brian Chesky’s fantastic talk at a YC event, where he spoke about how the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. Here are some thoughts shared from his article:
There are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode.
‘The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.’
‘Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will become the norm instead of a practice..’
‘Obviously, founders can't keep running a 2000-person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up and how sharp they are will probably vary from company to company. They'll even vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn trust.’
Founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode.
Read the article here.
The Secret To Finding Your Ideal Workplace.
According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report, 52% of employees say they are watching for or actively seeking a new job! More than half of the world’s employees are looking for a job! When you look at employee engagement at the workplace, just 23% of the employees are engaged there. A staggering 62% were actively disengaged.
So, what are the considerations and questions that you should ask or check if the job you are applying for has the ideal workplace that you may find easy to shortlist and consider rather than look for one more again soon:
Company culture plays an important role, and you should stay curious to observe and learn more about it. Culture cannot be assessed quantitatively, but it needs to be felt in every conversation and interaction.
Here are three questions that you may want to ask and seek answers. It may not be in this order, but it allows you to think about the questions you could consider asking:
“What are your company’s core values?” Observe how you get answers and dig deeper into how they practice these core values daily in the company.
Seek to understand the company's future potential, and you could ask a question like “Tell me a little more about who gets promoted here and how?” /“Can I understand a little more about why Mr/Ms. X got promoted?”
“When was the last time you got feedback here?” If the company seeks feedback regularly and finds ways to act on it, it tells a lot about the company.
You must observe and understand, ‘What does it feel like to work in that company?’ and sense if you would, at first glance, enjoy working there.
Amitabh Kant: A Classic Entrepreneur Within A Very Un-Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.
In this fantastic conversation with Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures, Amitabh Kant shares some incredible lessons about what it takes to be an impactful civil servant in government and his perspectives on entrepreneurship, digital infrastructure, and practical advice for entrepreneurs aiming to build world-class businesses from India.
Here are some key thoughts that he has shared in this conversation:
The importance of understanding and learning any local language if you want to influence and make a difference as a leader: ‘I spoke in the local language, and I gave all my speeches in Malayalam( A local Indian regional language). And that's how I perfected my skills in Malayalam language.’
You must learn to turn crisis into opportunities: ‘ As a punishment posting, I was posted as Secretary of Tourism. I thought I'd use this punishment posting to transform Kerala tourism, creating God’s Own Country Campaign.’
Think Big: ‘The market for Indians is not the 1.4 billion people of India; it is the 5 to 6 billion people across the world who will be moving from poverty to middle class in the next 5 to 6 years.’
Build resilience and relentless intensity: ‘ On the recent G20 declaration- One paragraph on Russia, China took us 300 hours of negotiation, 16 drafts failed.’
Surround yourself with people who are positive, not status quosists and think big if you are a leader: ‘I look for just three things in people. One is positivity and optimism, a huge amount of positivity and optimism. The will to change and people who are not status quoist, big-thinking people…’
You can click on the above video and watch it.
Why Do You Need To Have Both A Manager And A Founder’s Mentality?
There have been many discussions recently about what it takes to run a company - Founder mode or Manager Mode. Leaving debate, bias, and emotions aside, it is essential to look back at some companies' history and current state to understand this further. This can help you provide some directions that you may want to take personally rather than see them as conclusions. Remember, the answer is not always black and white.
The Rise And Decline of Intel
Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, both of whom were the founders who led the invention of the integrated circuit. Over the last five or six decades, Intel has played a pivotal role in shaping the computing revolution and played a dominant role in the PC revolution. So, where did things go wrong?
One critical aspect of managing a rapidly scaling company is the lack of internal visibility to complacency and competition. Intel suffered from that.
The other most significant missed opportunity in Intel’s history was its failure to capitalize on the mobile chip market during the rise of smartphones. In 2007, when Apple was developing the first iPhone, the company approached Intel to power its revolutionary device. However, Intel declined, unable to reach an agreement on pricing and intellectual property rights.
The company’s development cycle, which delivered new process nodes every two years, began to falter in the mid-2010s. Delays in transitioning to 10nm and later 7nm processes allowed competitors like TSMC to pull ahead, which is a leader in the 3nm process today.
So, what are the learnings?
Since revenue grows at an incredible rate in companies like Intel, people are required to just ‘run and manage’ the operations. The growth mode almost feels like nothing is going wrong. The people who join the company during the growth momentum phase take credit for the results. But sometimes, the narrative that it was the founders who set the foundation for this growth is lost. At this phase, people in charge of operations ‘optimise’ rather than ‘innovate’. Imagine that those decisions in 2007, which managers at Intel took, are hitting them today after two decades. Those people who were there at that time, making these decisions, may have been long gone! The question is - ‘Would the founders have made the same decisions then?’. The hard truth is maybe not.
This is why everyone who joins the company during the growth phase( in any phase) needs a founder’s mentality( This is from a brilliant book by Chris Zook and James Allen). In fact, they must understand they are ‘harvesting’ the hard work and risks from the past, but they must learn to ‘sow the seeds’ today, which may be fraught with inherent risks and work culture volatility. This is a crucial phase when ‘Culture cannot eat strategy for breakfast’ but actually ‘Strategy must eat Culture for breakfast’ - Developing this delicate balance is critical.
So, what is the founder mentality you and your teams need to develop?
(Source: The Founder’s Mentality)
Look at some of the key traits that you need to have: insurgency, frontline obsession, relentless experimentation, limitless horizon, etc.
Break down your business into three-boxes that may possibly have three work cultures and mindsets within the company.
Dr. Vijay Govindarajan wrote a brilliant book, Three Box Solution, on how to break down businesses and their operating units to protect themselves from future volatility.
When you examine your business and its current revenues through this lens, you get a realistic view of the past, present, and future. You also get a perspective on what types of strategy, people, and resources are needed.
Founders disrupt, build, and scale companies, while operating managers optimize, structure, and streamline the company as they scale. As a manager, Andy Grove did that for Intel in its early days, while Bill Gates, as a founder, did that for Microsoft.
The best founders must have a bit of a ‘manager mentality’, while the best managers must have a bit of a ‘founder mentality’ to manage and grow companies that can stand the test of time.
To succeed, you need to have both of these skills.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
There are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Both have their pros and cons.
‘Culture-fit’ is as vital as ‘Job-fit’ when shortlisting a place to work.
Leaders don’t ‘wait-for-task-to-be-given’ but ‘take-before-a-task-is’given.
A proper balance of ‘founder mentality’ and ‘manager mentality’ is essential to building a company that will endure.