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Step 2: Scale without sacrificing speed
In June, I wrote about a conference I attended in the US with a dozen founder-CEOs whose growing companies had all been purchased by the same corporate parent. The purpose was to discuss how their new...
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Step 3: Balancing heroes with systems
As founder-led companies grow, the founding team eventually needs to bring some order to the chaos—the unsustainable hours, the lack of control, the burn-out, the scarcity of systems, the...
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Step 4: Learn
For many people in business, the “experience curve” has become an artifact of the manufacturing age. While it explained a lot about market supremacy when huge, stable producers like General Motors and...
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Step 5: Simplify to redeploy
Vocabulary matters in business. One of the problems many large companies face is that bureaucrats have won the vocabulary war. They want us to believe that the opposite of “simple” is “advanced” and...
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Step 6: Adapt
As we come to the final step in the Journey North, which is all about adaptation, there is good news and bad news for insurgent companies. The good news is that incumbents are notably bad at strategic...
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Hammer time: Why Chinese founders value spikiness
During our DM100 meetings in Shanghai last week, the founders kept alluding to volleyball and Lang Ping, the former star player of the Chinese women’s Olympic volleyball team (and the former coach of...
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Incumbents and the Journey North, part 1
When I attended business school in Boston in the late 1980s, the big buzz was the notion of the “owner mindset.” We studied American economist Mike Jensen‘s classic paper, Theory of the Firm:...
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Why “nonnegotiables” and “values” aren’t the same thing
I’ve recently returned from São Paulo and Rio, where I had a series of meetings with some founder-led leadership teams. (A highlight: a helicopter ride from Angra dos Reis to Rio, during which we...
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Cultural workflows: Is that your mother riding that elephant?
In my recent blog post on surgical strikes, we talked briefly about “cultural workflows” and how they can slow a company down. During our eight weeks of workshops on how incumbent companies can...
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Speed: 10 ways to create a faster company
Over the last four weeks, I’ve had 10 conversations with CEOs in the US and Europe who had all seen the Founder’s Mentality® video and asked for more detail about how to speed up their organizations....
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Janusian thinking and the scale insurgent
Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, usually depicted with two faces staring in opposite directions. Albert Rothenberg, a psychiatrist well known for his research on the creative...
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Bus No. 4: Keeping the insurgency alive
How do founders keep the insurgency alive in their organizations? This question was at the heart of our 19th DM100 meeting, held in Johannesburg, and the conversation benefited from the experiences of...
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FxE=R: Finding the Right Balance
Earlier this year, I used the fading summer months as an excuse to choose a nice pub in the bucolic London suburb of Richmond to meet with Richard Rose and Noel Collett, the respective chairman and...
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Introducing the Bain Micro-Battles System℠
We’ve been doing less blogging lately because this Founder’s Mentality® topic has become quite hot, and we’re working with a lot of business leaders on how to become scale insurgents. The biggest new...
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