Quote of the Day - Business Chassis
I read this on LinkedIn the other day in an article where an Indian VC was giving advice to Indian entrepreneurs and using the recent flame out of a startup that they’d financed as a cautionary tale:
There was no support system - no financial controls, no infrastructure and processes. Nothing that would normally form the chassis of a company. Just a blind race to grow - to create new categories before the older ones had stabilised.
No one asked them to pause, to review, to reflect. No one asked them to measure, to monitor, to plan. One wonders what the hurry was about. It’s not as if the market was running away. - Source
The article is not about my former company. But that quote? Yeah, that could be talking about them.
And the following bits of advice to managers definitely apply to L’Enfant Terrible.
I told him he had a choice to make, between being a great talented individual player. Or being a manager. That choice had to determine his behaviour.
But if you’ve chosen to be a manager, you’ve then got to be among people, collaborate with them, lead them or be led by them, be able to handle their frustrations, to handle their competence and their incompetence. It's an ego-crushing journey where you need to learn to allow people their space to work. It has very little to do with intelligence - it is more about developing sensitivity - finding a way to motivate people, to pull them in one direction. A journey of frustration, but equally one of triumph when you see the team working together and winning - a journey you share with your team.
They say the difference between a politician and a statesman is that one is worried about the next election and the other is worried about the next generation.
I think you could similarly say that there’s a big difference between a manager and a leader. A manager is focused in their own goals/review/career, while a leader is focused on the goals/reviews/career of their team (and sometimes that team is the entire company).
***
Tangentially related (in that both L’Enfant Terrible and EVP were inexplicably hostile towards myself and my minion, two accomplished and professional females….)
From a post about a study of online gaming behavior that sought to test the hypothesis that "female-initiated disruption of a male hierarchy incites hostile behaviour from poor performing males who stand to lose the most status."
Here’s the critical part of their findings:
“We show that lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly. In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance. We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena.” - Source
There was no support system - no financial controls, no infrastructure and processes. Nothing that would normally form the chassis of a company. Just a blind race to grow - to create new categories before the older ones had stabilised.
No one asked them to pause, to review, to reflect. No one asked them to measure, to monitor, to plan. One wonders what the hurry was about. It’s not as if the market was running away. - Source
The article is not about my former company. But that quote? Yeah, that could be talking about them.
And the following bits of advice to managers definitely apply to L’Enfant Terrible.
I told him he had a choice to make, between being a great talented individual player. Or being a manager. That choice had to determine his behaviour.
But if you’ve chosen to be a manager, you’ve then got to be among people, collaborate with them, lead them or be led by them, be able to handle their frustrations, to handle their competence and their incompetence. It's an ego-crushing journey where you need to learn to allow people their space to work. It has very little to do with intelligence - it is more about developing sensitivity - finding a way to motivate people, to pull them in one direction. A journey of frustration, but equally one of triumph when you see the team working together and winning - a journey you share with your team.
They say the difference between a politician and a statesman is that one is worried about the next election and the other is worried about the next generation.
I think you could similarly say that there’s a big difference between a manager and a leader. A manager is focused in their own goals/review/career, while a leader is focused on the goals/reviews/career of their team (and sometimes that team is the entire company).
***
Tangentially related (in that both L’Enfant Terrible and EVP were inexplicably hostile towards myself and my minion, two accomplished and professional females….)
From a post about a study of online gaming behavior that sought to test the hypothesis that "female-initiated disruption of a male hierarchy incites hostile behaviour from poor performing males who stand to lose the most status."
Here’s the critical part of their findings:
“We show that lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly. In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance. We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena.” - Source