i am a mode, you are a syndrome

founder mode, in even more abstract terms

There was always going to be a part 2 on this one – do check out the comments to the previous “founder mode” post if you’re interested in this general subject because they’re very good.  I think I want to expand on one point I made there.

And that is – in the book, and in various bits and pieces of writing and consulting I’ve done since publication, I try to make a case that outsourcing is a bit dangerous and needs to be carefully engineered.  This is obviously related to my professional experience at Frontline Analysts, where the last decade has given me quite an education in the practicalities of ensuring that communication happens across organisational boundaries, and all the interesting and unpleasant things that can result when it doesn’t.

My guess is that a lot of what Paul Graham and Brian Chesky find frustrating about being pushed into “manager mode” is something like the teething troubles that often accompany an outsourcing project.  As founder of a growing startup, you’re used to dealing with something where the information network is capable of being largely held inside your own head.  Then someone comes in and tells you to take an important part of the operation and hand it over to the professionals, so you can concentrate on growth hacking or superscaling or whatnot.

The phrase “hire good people and let them get on with it” wears its significance on its face, doesn’t it?  It is a clear warning that while this is a technique of amplification that’s meant to increase the founder’s ability to do things (by setting general policies and handing over the detail to the managers), it’s also going to be an information bottleneck.  The relationship between a founder-CEO and a brand new professional management team that’s just been hired on the advice of one of the venture investors … is, I’m going to assert, going to look and feel much more like an outsourcing contract than an internal relationship between colleagues.

And that means that if the work isn’t done to ensure that the communication links happen and attention isn’t paid to the “translation and transduction” problem, delegation isn’t going to work.  The founder is still going to have a strong idea of the purpose of the system, but the actual purpose of the system (ie, the information that the system responds to and treats as relevant – “what it does”) is now a compromise between different levels.  That is going to cause frustration, and the frustration is going to be even greater because the founder is likely to only learn about these departures at a later stage, when they’ve become significant and possibly irreversible.  It’s like the “abutment” principle of safety engineering – you have to be very careful when strengthening something, because you really don’t want to put a strong piece of metal in a position where it’s constantly bumping up against a weaker component.

So this is my diagnosis; “founder mode” is the same thing as “founder syndrome”, just viewed from a different angle and at a different point in time.  I should have realised this earlier, because a huge part of my conversations with Will Butler-Adams, wherever they started, tended to come back to discussions of Andrew Ritchie. (I sometimes joked that any question you asked at the factory, even if it was about where the toilets were, would get an answer beginning “well the thing you have to understand about Andrew is …”).  I think we struck a balance in that book between recognising that it took someone as founder-mode-maxed as he was to get the folding bike into existence at all, and also recognising that in the end, founder mode really did restrict the ability of Brompton to grow.

So the synthesis between “founder mode” and “founder syndrome” is maybe that you want the founder to be in control of the identity of the company.  That is to say, the founder is the person who gives the answer to the graphic designers when they ask “what is this company really about?”

And (here’s an important Stafford Beer point) you need to ensure that this “keeper of the corporate soul” role is not an emeritus position – the identity of the company is what determines how it balances present and future, so it has to be completely integrated into the management.  The founder has to preserve the ability to say “Action X is not-us, Action Y is us”, for anything the company does.  And consequently, the real question of founder mode is something like …

The founder is going to make decisions based on the model of the company contained in his or her head.  That model is going to be a homomorphism of the company (defined in algebra as a structure-preserving many-to-one map and in “Lying for Money” as ‘a sort of simplified summary which loses a lot of potentially relevant detail but hopefully captures the important features’).  As long as the homomorphism is preserved, the founder’s decisions will be relevant to the company – they might not be right, but they will have roughly the effects intended, the corporate identity will be consistent with the founder’s intention and, basically, whether you get rich or not will depend on whether your founder is a genius or a dud. 

If it isn’t, then the mental model no longer corresponds to reality and the founder’s decisions are not going to make sense.  They will seem bizarre and capricious to the operational management and staff, and the founder themselves will end up being disappointed and looking for someone to blame.  The system no longer has the founder’s identity, but nor will it be allowed to develop an emergent identity of its own – it has just become unregulated and will likely blow up.

So …

Founder mode is a system of management which aims to preserve the homomorphism between the company and a single person’s mental representation of it; manager mode is the abandonment of this attempt.  Founder syndrome is an attempt to continue in founder mode when its basic condition of possibility is no longer satisfied. 

Consequently we ought to identify a parallel “manager syndrome”, which is the attempt to leave founder mode while the founder is still capable of maintaining it.  And I think what Graham and Chesky could talking about could be called an “anti-founder syndrome”, which is the conscious attempt to destroy the homomorphism.