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Leadership economics and the benefits of scale
I have just returned from a week in India talking to business leaders about Founder’s MentalitySM and discussing the key challenge facing insurgent companies: As they grow, the leadership team...
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Who is the king and who are the subjects?
I’ve just finished a set of meetings with founder-led companies in South America. Many of our conversations focused on the basic question of how these companies can continue to maintain their Founder’s...
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Founder’s Mentality is a gift—with maintenance required
Though there are many ways to estimate the success rates of start-up businesses in the world, there is no doubt that all of them produce an extremely low number. We estimate that only one in 500,000...
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Do the Founder’s Mentality paths apply to individuals?
Sandy Ogg, a senior operating partner at Blackstone, is one the best students of business leadership I know. I had breakfast with him in New York City recently, and I spoke with him about what makes a...
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Does your company really use its leadership position?
During my time in NYC, I had a long conversation with a CEO about the Founder’s MentalitySM framework. We talked about the “default path” of many companies as they move from being insurgents to...
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The second-generation role: Maintain the magic
I spent this past week in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore talking to founders—or as Indians tend to call them, “promoters.” A recurrent theme was the role of the second generation—the sons and daughters of...
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The four great balancing acts
During my recent trip to Brazil, one founder asked me to provide a list of the likely tensions his fast-growing company would face over the next couple of years. I prepared four key items, which I...
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My Founder’s Mentality notebook
Banyan Tree’s chain of world-famous spa and luxury resorts is recognized as one of the most visible and fastest-growing brands in Asia. But it grew out of some unlikely circumstances. Its founder, Ho...
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Put the country first, but get a good sponsor
One of the major themes we have been exploring is how individual leaders bring a Founder’s MentalitySM to large, complex organizations. Specifically, we’re asking: How do great leaders ensure their own...
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Leadership: Combining inspiration and impact
Next week, four of my colleagues at Bain & Company will set off to Antarctica on a unique mission to promote sustainability. The expedition is run by an organization called 2041, led by Robert...
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Why mass doesn’t always equal energy
Albert Einstein was born 135 years ago this coming Friday. He is the founder of modern physics and through the world’s most famous equation, e = mc2, forever linked mass and energy together. In...
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Golden threads: How stories link founders and professionals
I love seeing how management teams choose to describe their company’s history on their corporate websites. Almost all companies have an “About Us” tab that includes a “History” subtab. These typically...
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Aging and five ways to preserve eternal youth
In his book The Future of the Mind, author Michio Kaku discusses, among other things, advances in science that might reverse the aging process. He writes: Traditionally there has been no consensus...
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Stop chasing shibboleths
In 1979, during my first year of university, the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The following summer, President Carter reinstated the Selective Service registration requirement for...
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Embracing chaos
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.— Friedrich Nietzsche Our Developing Market 100 meetings in Mumbai this week—like those in Shanghai several weeks ago—have left me with a...
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Speed: A founder-led company’s greatest asset?
I was in the US last week for meetings and had the great privilege of listening to a panel of company founders discuss the net benefits (or costs) of selling to a much larger corporate parent. They...
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Why trust speeds up organizations
In my last blog post, I wrote about a founder’s panel I attended, where individual founders discussed how selling a company to a large corporate buyer could increase or decrease its “speed.” One of...
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The bigger we get, the smaller we think
In meetings with clients over the past few weeks, a common theme has emerged regarding the perils of planning as companies grow. The latest instance was at a meeting in the US in which several founders...
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Why 97% of strategic planning is a waste of time
In recent meetings with the CEOs of several large global companies in the financial services, industrial goods and consumer products sectors, it became clear to me that many corporate leaders are fed...
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Going slow to go fast… in 1861
From the raki ritual in Turkey to the peculiar institution of nemawashi in Japan, we have returned often to the theme that leaders sometimes need to “go slow to go fast.” At a friend’s recommendation,...
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