Ep. 22: Founder Mode vs. Manager Mode is the Wrong Question
About this episode:
Original Air Date: October 28, 2024If you’ve been on LinkedIn at all over the last month, you’ve likely seen at least one post (or several more than you’d care to) about “founder mode.”
Presented as a counter to “manager mode” (meant to represent highly bureaucratic leadership rife with micromanaging and delegation), “founder mode” is all about championing the pioneering, hands-on behaviors of startup founders scaled to organizations of any size. And sure, when these are the only choices, anything that’s not “manager mode” sounds like a great option. But show us any binary, and we’re bound to start asking some tough questions.
This week Rodney and Sam dig into how “founder mode” actually shows up in practice, whether it causes more harm to an organization than good, and what it means when real leadership seems to be left out of the discussion entirely.
Mentioned in this episode:
Founder Mode, article by Paul Graham
“people positivity episode”: AWWTR Ep. 21
“strategy episode”: AWWTR Ep. 2
“futures thinking”: BNW Ep. 34 with Kevin Kelly
The Ready’s Depthfinding framework
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
I would love to be a fly on the wall in the C-suite of Microsoft or Apple if they talked about Founder Mode at all.
Rodney Evans:
I know.
Sam Spurlin:
I wonder how Satya read Founder Mode or how Tim read Founder Mode. It's like, hmm, all right...well.
[Intro music]
Rodney Evans:
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy in my favorite podcast blouse and I think his also is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
That's right. I busted out the best shirt for this episode because I wanted to bring my best foot forward.
Rodney Evans:
Objectively the best shirt. Welcome back to At Work with The Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work meets the present moment.
Sam Spurlin:
Each episode we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into and pulling it apart like a delectable croissant and propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
Did you blow any spit bubbles while you said croissant?
Sam Spurlin:
I did not.
Rodney Evans:
That's a callback.
Sam Spurlin:
That's a callback, that's right. I learned that in French class. That's why I nailed that pronunciation.
Rodney Evans:
I would know, but it sounds delicious. Because we love a work meme, this week we're talking about Founder Mode, but before we do, let us check in.
Sam Spurlin:
All right, Rodney, it's spooky season. It's Halloween. So what's your Halloween costume plan for this year?
Rodney Evans:
I have one because Bridget does it for us. So one of my really good friends, I told the story on this show before of my best Halloween costume ever, which was also a partner costume with Bridget because Bridget is both the vision and the execution. She is founder mode and manager mode on our Halloween game, and this year she and I are being Diane and Carla from the old show Cheers. So we are going to be waitresses in '80s clothing with aprons and the whole deal, and I am very much looking forward to it.
Sam Spurlin:
Nice, that's cool.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. What about you?
Sam Spurlin:
I'm going to be a hot dog.
Rodney Evans:
Wow. Just really? Is this what that book Lean In was about?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I think it's actually waiting for me downstairs in the package room. I believe it has arrived. It's a shame that I'm actually not wearing it right now. It may be the only thing that could beat the podcast blouse would be a full head-to-toe hot dog costume.
Rodney Evans:
It is a shame. Also coming full circle because we're on an old Zencaster with Aaron Dignan's name in the link, the first year that I met Aaron, he was a hot dog for Halloween.
Sam Spurlin:
Really?
Rodney Evans:
And I remember him showing me a picture of him eating a hot dog while in a hot dog costume. And I was like, "Is that cannibalism?"
Sam Spurlin:
I'm definitely intending to follow in his footsteps somehow.
Rodney Evans:
You got to.
Sam Spurlin:
I didn't even realize that consciously. That's the power of founder mode.
What is Founder Mode? The concept behind the debate
Rodney Evans:
Well played, sir. Well played. So, y'all there is an article that's been floating around the interwebs and all that have a hot take. There have been reactions to it and reactions to the reactions and now we're going to make a podcast reacting to the reactions, to the reaction to the thing. And that article was about a thing coined as "founder mode." We will get into all of what that means, but essentially the idea is that there are two ways to run a startup and one is in founder mode and one is in manager mode. And we're going to talk about the difference and maybe just that binary in general.
But the pattern that I thought was really interesting for us to explore is this. I believe that founder mode takes the position that there is a unique genius slash hero that is required to run an organization, but where that hero exists, they often create an organization that depends on their heroics and therefore cannot be run by someone else, which reinforces and validates the need for founder mode. So that's the pattern that I see get repeated and we've seen it in pop culture when a founder leaves and has to come back. And there's a lot in this that is to me about what the system design is that requires a founder to founder mode indefinitely.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool. And this might be a good time if you haven't read the article, it's actually quite short. Just Google "Founder Mode Paul Graham" and give it a quick read because we're not going to do an in-depth line by line kind of take of it and it'll be also in the show notes of this episode. So go give it a quick read, come back and you'll be better situated for the conversation we are about to have. So where do you want to start to dig into this idea?
Rodney Evans:
I think I want to start by asking you what made you interested in really talking about this? What was it about the founder mode versus manager mode idea articulated in that article that spoke to you? And honestly, why do you think it's sort of tap this vein in the zeitgeist because it has caught fire in a way.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, the fact that it did tap into some sort of vein was the first thing that brought it to my attention was just seeing people talking about it. I definitely travel in circles where people talk about organizational articles and things that come out, but I hadn't seen anything quite grab the attention of people the way this had. Partially, I think Paul Graham is a bit of a divisive figure. So I think anytime he writes something, there's generally some chatter about it.
But there was something about this idea, which I think really...for a certain type of person, really gives them permission to do the thing they want to do anyway. And to have a ready-made excuse to not be collaborative, to not work well with others, to not cultivate an organization where other people can contribute. And to just do that hero sort of move of just I'm going to do what I want. And Paul Graham put a name to this thing and now it's not just me being aggressive and abrasive, I'm "founder moding". And I think that is what kind of caught my attention because I have already seen people use this article as a bit of an excuse to do that sort of thing.
What founders actually do well, and what gets mythologized
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that's really interesting. It's amazing how when you give a label for something, what kind of mythology it can take on. Let's start with is founder mode bad? What do you think?
Sam Spurlin:
Well, if we thought it was clearly one or the other, we probably wouldn't make a podcast episode about it.
Rodney Evans:
Perhaps.
Sam Spurlin:
And to Paul Graham's credit, I think there are some ideas within it that are useful and are good. And I think where my mind goes initially is that complete disengagement from a founder or complete kind of "I rise above everything and everybody else handles the stuff" is not good either. So founder mode is not the only alternative to that. But if you just look what is the opposite of founder mode, I think I have certainly seen organizations where that has been the posture that a founder has eventually fallen into and I don't think that's actually great for anybody.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And I think that it's worth saying founding something is a really difficult thing to do. I've worked with a lot of founders who have been incredibly challenged by the ebbs and flows and just trying to get enough attention and momentum and have enough impact fast enough that the thing takes flight. That is a very particular kind of inception energy that I do think is valuable and I think it's uncommon and I don't think that everybody has it naturally or has the conditions to exercise it if they do have a great idea. So I don't want to discount the idea that being in the mode of actually founding something is important because I don't think we would have a lot of upstarts without it.
And you have to have people in this world who question the status quo and are iconoclastic and anti-authoritarian in some ways and look around and go like it's like Airbnb has referenced a lot in that article. The co-founders of Airbnb could have looked at VRBO and said, "I think they've got it." And just let it be. And as it turned out, instead they created an app and a philosophy that completely changed how people travel and how they think about property. And we need people like that in this world, I think. And the idea of founder mode as a persistent requirement for quality is inane.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, absolutely agree there. I think just the one last kind of positive thing that comes to mind for me is that especially early in an organization, the founder really sets the tone for everything in the organization. What is quality? What sort of behavior do we permit here? And I think it does this all a disservice to pretend the founder doesn't have an outsized impact on setting those kind of initial conditions for how an organization is going to run into the future.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And I don't see a reason that they shouldn't. The sort of architecting and the building of all of the initial walls and stuff, it's an exciting and it's an important thing and I think the architect's fingerprints are always going to be on a house no matter who ultimately builds it and decorates it and lives in it. That's worth acknowledging because I think part of what I objected to actually in a bunch of the content that I read about the founder mode thing is I think it actually discounts in some ways that initial vision and energy and architecture to say that the only way to have the house keep expanding is by the architect to be there. Let and encourage and design for founders to start shit, that's cool. And to do the things that you're saying to potentially be some of the genetic material for how an organization behaves and what it steers toward and what the foundational principles are. And I think that stuff is really valuable and I actually think it cheapens it to say, but you got to keep being there and making sure or it'll all go sideways.
The false binary behind Founder Mode vs Manager Mode
Sam Spurlin:
Love that. So why don't we start with, I think the thing that rubbed both of us wrong the most, which is this false dichotomy that is set up in the article. Do you want to start there?
Rodney Evans:
I do. So I wanted to make the whole episode about this and Sam wisely waved me off, but we talk a lot about either or thinking at The Ready, and you've heard me say "the third way" approximately nine million times on this podcast.
Sam Spurlin:
You are practically Rodney "The Third Way" Evans.
Rodney Evans:
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Sam Spurlin:
You're welcome.
Rodney Evans:
That's my baseball nickname. I think that there are a lot of problems with either or thinking that people don't really tap into because it's not something that we talk about. And I do believe in the third way, I do basically always think that there is one. And because I think I anchor to that, I don't critique the "either/or" thing often, but there are a few things that really bugged me and it bugged me in this article that was like it's either founder mode or manager mode and manager mode was painted as colorless suits who just are professionals for hire.
Sam Spurlin:
Lied their way to the top.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly. Which I'm like, well, I think there are managers who probably don't fall into that category exactly. But regardless, the thing is about either/or thinking and it has a lot of tenants in colonialism and white supremacy and there's a long and rich history of how either/or thinking has come to be part of systemic design.
And on the positive it does simplify our choices to believe that there are only two. But what it generally doesn't allow for is a lot of creativity in terms of what combinations of choices are, the exploration of a bunch of different alternatives, and usually it also really invites polarization. So anytime we get into binaries, and this article is a perfect example, it's choose your side. Choose your fighter. And it's like what is the benefit of that? To me, it's so pointless, and I see this in all kinds of places in organizational design where it's like we're either fully self-managing and a flat organization where we fire all the managers or we're the most bureaucratic, most hierarchical, most command and control. And I'm like, "Guys, it is not like that. You do not have to choose the most extreme sides of this fence almost ever in this life."
Sam Spurlin:
There's a universe of options between those two that are rich and interesting and creative and don't have to be exactly like any other organization. And when you set up a false dichotomy like this, and if you don't initially catch it, that's why I think it's so dangerous about this kind of rhetorical tool is that my first reading of Founder Mode, just the quick kind of power skim, it's like, "Oh yeah. Manager mode? That sucks." The way you just described manager mode. They're like, yeah, founder mode all the way. And of course it took me a split second to be like, okay, obviously these are not the only two ways to run an organization, but when you present it in that way it's very easy to just, like you said, choose your fighter and now you're on your team and you've got the other team over there and now we can just talk past each other and fight about fiction.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And it's like in this conflict, which is not really a conflict actually, it's just an article that invites people to make a choice. But that is how either/or thinking goes importantly to me, you're asking to choose between two things that are deeply imperfect when the third thing which is creating the kind of leadership and the kind of vision and the kind of work that your organization requires to be successful in scale isn't discussed or on the table at all. So it's like you either have a visionary at the helm who holds the organization to account or you have a bunch of suits who don't give a shit and are just functionaries. And I'm like, both of those suck. Both of those are terrible choices and neither of them considers organizational design and what a system needs to do and be in order to scale effectively. It's completely predicated on the idea that the effort of one or a very small group of humans is the reason that an organization succeeds or fails, which is only just such a particular part of that story.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and it lets you really center your ego in the story of what is going on here. If things are going well and you're founder mode-ing, then it's pretty easy to draw that causal connection in your mind. It's because of how I'm doing stuff and if you're not founder mode-ing and things aren't going well, well then obviously I need to get in there and start throwing my weight around. And in general, when we have anybody in an organization, but particularly senior leaders driving with their ego, it very rarely ends up in a good place for anybody but them.
Why Founder Mode is a fragile business practice
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, totally. One of the articles that Jack gave us was the recent Kim Scott op-ed in the New York Times, which I thought was really brilliant because it was talking about how this idea is not how Silicon Valley started, and in fact a lot of the most successful leaders have been collaborative and cooperative and have invited more people into the owning and the stewardship of the place. And that is in fact how Apple became as successful as: it was and Google became as successful as it was and the sort of reduction to there's this singular hero who never listened to anybody and that is how Apple became Apple. A: it's just like not true. B: it's also not very helpful because even if it were true, how many of those people are out there?
Even if there is a story in which that myth holds up to scrutiny, and I don't know that story if there is one, because most places that have a very famous founder, when you actually talk to people inside of the building, you get a very different story than what is posted on their website and in their kitchen by their kombucha station, et cetera. So even if that person exists, who can successfully both start and scale and go it completely alone based on their unique instinct, that's not a model for creating and growing companies because how many of those people are out there at the right place and the right time that they can make a go of it? I'm just thinking not enough.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and it'd be one thing if we were sitting here trying to make this argument and looking around at the most successful organizations choose your metric, financial or otherwise. And how many of them are actually founder lead. I don't have the list in front of me. Facebook obviously is still led by Zuckerberg, but you've got Microsoft...Satya Nadella, you've got Apple...Tim Cook. There are so many counter examples to founder mode being the way that organizations get successful and stay successful that it's not even hard to find those. And I would love to be on a fly on the wall in the C-suite of Microsoft or Apple if they talked about founder mode at all.
Rodney Evans:
I know.
Sam Spurlin:
I wonder how Satya read Founder Mode or how Tim read Founder Mode. It's like, hmm, all right, well.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, same. I would be very interested and I think that one of the points that we talk a lot about on this show but particularly shows up when you start to orient to the specialness and frankly the overwork of an individual is just fragility. You're just creating a fragile system. There is no resilience in requiring one person to be there forever and stay forever and hold the vision in their mind. Obviously the hit by the bus question is the most obvious one, but it's even just anything that scales will reach a level of complexity where founder mode breaks. That is inevitable. And so it's a ceiling on the success of the company to say that this person has to be involved in every important decision because it's like well then you're going to have to stay in the range of that person's expertise.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And then if you range outside of that person's expertise, but they still have the outsized impact of being involved in those things, then you are relying on their judgment continuing to be right or continuing to be lucky, neither of which is particularly resilient.
Rodney Evans:
That's really true. And I also think that in that kind of reliance and dependence, what you're also not doing is requiring people inside of the organization to learn that kind of judgment. And hearkening back to other episodes, our people positivity episode, our strategy episode, like paying attention to market signals, integrating what is happening in the landscape with strategy either for the organization or factory, these are skills that people can learn and practice. This is not being born with perfect pitch. Are there people who are naturally better at vision? I'm certain that there are. Can smart people who care practice visioning and long-term thinking and future scenario planning, yes they can. I've seen people in client organizations for 20 years learn how to do these moves. And so again, just in terms of sustainability and scalability and adaptability and just resilience, I'm like, don't tell people at your company that they don't know how to do that and they never will. That's not a good idea.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. And the flip side of that, yes, those skills are learnable and developable and if you don't ever get the opportunity to practice or exercise those skills, they will atrophy as well or completely fail to develop.
Founder Mode creates learned helplessness across the organization
Sam Spurlin:
Going back to the pattern as you described it, creating an environment where the founder feels like they have to do the thing because people aren't stepping up to do it because they don't have the muscle memory to do it.
Rodney Evans:
Which is honestly almost every founder I've ever either coached or worked with their leadership team or been around in any context at some point has had the exact victim narrative that you are articulating right now. Which is like, "I'm the only one who can..." , and I'm like, "Yeah, man, you are the only one because you set it up this way. Because you told all of them to shut up in color and now you're like, why am I the only one who thinks about this? Why am I the only one who cares? It's like because you told them not to. Because you told them you got it and you're the only one who got it, so why would they do something else?"
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. And I'm sitting here thinking I could get on board potentially with the idea of founder mode in moments of crisis and emergency that we have to get through in the short term. I could be convinced that that is something... I've seen that kind of need to be the reality in various places. The key thing there though would be short-term, temporary, there's an end point to it. I don't think any founder wants to do that forever. There are lots of workaholic founders out there, but I don't think many of them want to do that literally for the rest of their life. So there's something about taking that emergency sort of mindset and just operating with that as if we are always in an emergency, which is just a recipe for the individual's burnout, but also I feel like it burns out the organization itself, the processes we have, the policies we have. If everything is at 11 all the time, you're going to burn those things out.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I agree with you. And I think that this is one of the places where, again, I am anchoring to half a dozen founders that I've worked closely with in my career and thinking about how this showed up and it very much did in all of these situations. And it's like there is usually not a lot of explicitness about things like authority. And so there's a lot of implicit rules. And to your point, Sam, I would argue that there's probably a water line. Often founders have more ownership, often they have more stake. Often they're the ones in touch with investors, blah, blah, blah, blah, that there might be a water line that is like, "Yo, when shit is hitting the fan, I'm the decider.
I will not be building consensus. I will ask for advice from whoever I want it and then we got to go" because ultimately it is the founder's butt that is usually on the line in a crisis, especially when this is existential. And so I agree with you that there are moments where I think a singular point that is decisive and where you're marrying basically responsibility and authority and consequences in one person is a thing that will happen occasionally and probably makes a lot of sense. And I'm like, but can we not have all of the rules be implicit? Can that be a real rule that's made explicit and can we make it explicit that not everything is that?
Sam Spurlin:
Where it's like evoking martial law.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. Can we be explicit that sometimes we invoke martial law and everybody understands that that's for the common good and that we will end as soon as the crisis is over? Maybe.
Founder Mode and organizational debt: The hidden long term cost
Rodney Evans:
Ali and I wrote this article a bunch of years ago about organizational debt, which is not a concept that we came up with, it's been around for a long time. But the point of the article was to talk about how organizational debt can often be traced to unmet needs, particularly in a leader. And the focus of organizational debt as we talk about it at The Ready is usually on processes and systems that no longer serve and it often is in the form of bureaucracy and the servicing of the organization instead of the work to be done that actually adds value to the customer.
I say this is preamble because the other side of the organizational debt cycle that Ali and I talked about is not the bureaucratic side, it's the chaotic side. And this is a side that I see with founder mode and it's just the idea that in a founder's refusal to be pinned down, basically, they are not making explicit rules which creates dependence on them, which means the only way for people to get anything done is through influence, which reinforces the dependence on them. And it's like then the organizational debt is how do you politic your way into convincing the founder of your opinion? And I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in organizations. I worked with one for several years and I swear to you 80% of the effort exerted by that executive team, which was a team of very experienced and well compensated professionals, was how to get the founder to take their perspective and how to influence him because they didn't have any real authority of their own.
And I was like, what a waste of calories having $6 million in payroll basically just used to try to get this dude to play on their... It was insanely inefficient and so wasteful and I haven't talked to him, but I'm certain that guy read that article and was like, "Yeahhhh! Founder mode is the only way!" But that organization, it was incredibly inefficient. People had the worst learned helplessness I've ever seen anywhere because they were basically, at the end of the day, he decides and it's always martial law.
What actually leadership that looks like beyond Founder Mode
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. I wanted to ask you, so we've teased this Depthfinding concept that we've been working on and we're going to do a whole podcast series on it that we're working on right now. But part of the idea in this is we talk about the role of leaders in various ages. And not to give the whole spiel, but basically in our current age we call the intelligence age, there's this idea that leaders are not just pushing, thinking and "doing" down into the organization, but the organization is actually also pushing "doing" back up into the leadership. And I'm wondering how does that match up with the articulation of doing that is in this founder's mode article?
Rodney Evans:
That's a very good question. I'm going to give you my very short take and then I'm going to toss it back to you.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, great.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. So I think that where the "doing" thing gets confusing with leaders is that they think that it might mean micromanaging and just parachuting back into people's work and ripping it out of their hands and doing it for them. That is very much not what we mean. I think in terms of something like founder mode, there is actually more natural orientation towards thinking and doing combined I think in founder mode than in manager mode for example. And I feel like it should be directed at things that are actually useful. So directed at like...the doing as a founder might really be talking to other founders, understanding other categories, visiting customers...like deeply understanding the business firsthand first person.
And also I think a lot of really great founders in history have also kept their hand closely on one or two special projects where they are really like this feature or this product is my thing that I am incubating. And they haven't gotten to the point where they're just opining on other people's work. They are still producing something themselves. And I think that's really cool and how it should be for a whole variety of reasons, but I don't think that it's just making the decisions.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
What do you think?
Sam Spurlin:
That tracks for me as we continue to develop this idea for The Ready, we should probably be thinking ahead to what's the misunderstanding of this that it probably is the micromanagement. I think at least in some of the workshops that I've given using this content, that is I think where leaders initially go to. And I think one of the things that I am thinking about with the doing is the doing that you are doing as a leader, English is awesome, building capacity for us to do new things, better things in the future, or are you just getting us through this moment? And I think it is going back to that martial law idea, but I think when we talk about doing it and thinking in the intelligence age, it's not just the doing for right now, it's the work that we can do right now to make tomorrow, and next week, and next year, and 10 years down the road better or set us up to be able to do those things as well.
Rodney Evans:
What's cool about what you just said that I haven't thought about is it's the idea of continual founding, but as part of the company. It's like what are you going to take zero to one next? Okay, so you made this company and so now that you have this material, what experiments are you running to decide what is the adjacency? What is the longer term big swing? What a cool way to think about founder mode as being a serial entrepreneur in your own company and being potentially the person, and I certainly have had elements of this in my role where once I was not completely engaged in client work all day every day and able to look out more that I was able to be like, "let's make a thing." I think founder mode potentially, done really thoughtfully, those people who already are likely oriented to entrepreneurialism and to the starting of things might be able to in a disciplined way do that for their companies, which I think is awesome.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally and completely necessary if the company is going to continue on beyond just the initial founding idea.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, every core business will decay. So what is your next play? And when we look at really progressive organizations like a hire, there is an ability to start a micro enterprise at hire and to get funding and to be a founder within the ecosystem of that organization and to try to find product market fit. I think that's really cool. I don't think that that is how founder mode is being defined, at least in this moment and in these memes.
Why Founder Mode is incompatible with collaboration and shared ownership
Sam Spurlin:
I think the last thing that stood out to me, and I don't think I was the first one to make this observation, I think maybe I saw John Cutler write something about it first, but just it was striking that the word leadership does not appear in this article at all. And I'm curious if you pull any meaning from that or have any thoughts about that.
Rodney Evans:
I don't. I don't know. You go first.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, I think this is the third wayness of it potentially that there is a version of this article that is perhaps more nuanced and probably less viral that sets up other polarities other than manager mode and founder mode, and somewhere in there is the idea of leadership. And it comes back to I think what we already talked about earlier, what you were talking about in terms of building capacity for the organization, building an organization that doesn't actually require someone to be in founder mode all the time. That requires leadership. And I think sometimes times we equate being a founder with being a leader and sometimes they are the same and hopefully they are the same did and hopefully it's a pretty overlapping concept, but often not. You can be a founder and be in founder mode. And I think if I have a hypothesis that if you find yourself in founder mode all the time, I wonder if you're not in leadership mode at that point. I'm holding that lightly because I literally just had that thought, but there's something about these two ideas seem to potentially be incompatible with each other.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I don't disagree. And we have been talking a lot about the idea of that modern leadership is really stewardship. And what I love about that word, and I know not everybody likes it and that's fine, but what I love about that idea is leading takes the perspective that you are out front and you are there first, and stewardship takes the perspective that you are responsible for the health of something and for creating or maintaining a thriving thing that can continue to maybe grow or maybe exist or maybe end or whatever it is meant to be doing that your job is to support it in doing what it's meant to be doing. And that is inherently not a power game. That is inherently a game that is about the thing itself. Whether the thing is a piece of land in a conservancy or your family's money in a trust or an organization. The idea is like you as the steward are responsible to the thing. And founder mode I think supposes the opposite, which is the thing is responsible to you.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's well said. I guess is there anything else we wanted to hit?
Rodney Evans:
I mean, the only other thing is I fundamentally believe that the speed and complexity in which we are operating right now does require collaboration. I just don't think in the words of some of my old colleagues that you can fight a network with a chain of command. The world is inherently connected and I just don't think that up and down a hierarchical link is how you adapt and respond. I fundamentally believe that to succeed at pretty much any scale today requires collaboration of some kind. And if you are going to hoard power in an organization and keep the rules ever changing and implicit and create competition between the people around you, which is something that happens a lot in founder mode, I don't think that you can have it both ways. I don't think that you can sit in the seat of absolute power and have real collaboration. I think if you are going to crown yourself king, you are necessarily going to create competition among those around you, and I don't think it's possible to survive that way in the longterm.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, that makes me think of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, which basically says that a system must have at least as much variety as the environment it's trying to control. So I think the environment in this case, the organization and the complexity of our organizations and of the world in which they're operating in is only going up. So the system for controlling that, if it's just a dude or a dudette making calls, that is not a system that has as much variety as what is actually trying to control. So I think there is an incompatibility there where in the long-term, you will not see the results that you are maybe seeing in these short-term sort of emergency sort of situations.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I love it when you bring nerd stuff.
Sam Spurlin:
Nerd shit.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, nerd shit. Also, I have to make a joke that I've been sitting on since the very beginning of this podcast when you were talking about how you run in circles of org nerds, and then I just kept thinking about how we should just call that "a nerdicle", and now it's read into the record and we'll live forever.
Anyway, Sam, let's give the people some ideas. That's what they come here for. You go first.
Sam Spurlin:
Boooooooo. Okay.
Rodney Evans:
I thought you were booing me. I was like, wow.
Sam Spurlin:
I was actually booing myself because I see what three hours ago me wrote into the board, and I think it's just nonsense. So I've been noodling on something throughout this episode. I'm going to try to articulate it, but I don't know-
Rodney Evans:
Heck yeah, emergence. Let's go.
Tip 1: Financial optimization shouldn’t be the first principle of founders
Sam Spurlin:
Emergence or just bad. And I think the thing that I'm sitting with here is that one of the things that founder mode assumes is that the only thing we are optimizing for is the financial return on the organization. Obviously it's important. If you don't have that, you don't have lots of other things. So not downplaying that as a thing that is important, but I will always be a voice of work can be more than that. It should be more than that. It's an opportunity for people to grow and to learn about themselves and find meaning in their work and help each other and just be good humans working together on something that matters.
And I think that's what maybe rubbed me the most wrong way about the founder mode article, which is just like we don't give a shit about any of that. I'm here to make decisions so that we make as much money as possible. And I know there's caveats out the butt around, yes, we need to do that, but I guess, I don't know, the thing I want just throw out there instead is there are other things to optimize for and I think if you adopt a founder mode as a leader or as an actual founder, I think you're cutting yourself off from a lot of really good stuff that you can experience as someone leading an organization.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. It's such an interesting observation. Because it is really true that there is just an underlying assumption that financial maximization is the first principle for everything, which also is recursive in nature because the people who are going to benefit the most from that are the founder and their investors.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Tip 2: Design checks, balances, and accountability for power and authority into your governance
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Interesting. So my idea isn't really an idea, but it is a-
Sam Spurlin:
Join the club. Join the club.
Rodney Evans:
It's amusing. I've been thinking a lot about this lately because of structure work that I'm doing at The Ready right now, and I think that an alternative to manager mode, which we didn't spend a lot of time on, but is problematic for other reasons, is really thinking about in an organization less about either hierarchy or just cowboy nonsense, what are real checks and balances on power or on authority that aren't just reporting lines? It's not just like I'm the manager so I keep people in line or I'm the founder, so I ultimately swoop in and decide whenever I want to. It's like, what are some reasonable checks on that? And it can be things like if you're a founder who's like, I'm in founder mode, then is there an opportunity for people to convey their confidence in you in a safe and anonymous way?
Is there a way for you to at least understand whether the decisions that you are making are creating the kind of environment that people want to work and live in a non-employee survey, HR-ish way? A lot of founders that I've been around, again, I think this is a reinforcing narrative of "My job is so hard, I'm the only one who can do it. I'm the only one who understands, I carry the weight of the world. No one else wants to help me or could help me because they're too unspecial to do so and therefore, I don't need any hedge on me. I need no constraints because of the ubiquity of this situation." And I just don't really buy that. I'm just like, have an and on cord somewhere in your organization that if you are in founder mode and it is unchecked, except theoretically by a board which is a topic for another day or investors, which is also a topic for another day, I feel like at a minimum a founder should be held to account to some degree by their organization.
Sam Spurlin:
Love that. All right. Should we wrap here?
Rodney Evans:
Let's do it.
Sam Spurlin:
We are always looking for new topics for the show, so if you have an organizational pattern that you're having trouble changing or you just want to hear us talk about, shoot us a note at podcast[at]theready[dot]com.
Rodney Evans:
This show is engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by Jack Van Amburg, who's still here. He's been heard the whole time. Our work with The Ready was created by The Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you so much for listening.