I was reading “Failure as an event” post on Seth Godin’s blog. After self-deprecating himself talking about 20+ large entrepreneurial failures he was part of, Seth shared some of the lessons he has learned. The biggest one that caught my eye was: “Being the dumbest partner in a room of smart people is exactly where you want to be.” This sounded very much like a personal belief I have for myself. In any environment I choose to surround myself with extremely bright people. This is key to my personal growth. If I find myself in the opposite conditions, I simply choose to go somewhere else.
Another point I want to me is that much has been written on the topics of leadership, picking business partners, building winning teams, and successful formulas for startups. Walk into any bookstore and you will see rows upon rows of books on those topics. So why do so many founders/leaders of startups are still committing the sins all for the sake of their egos? First they start with nice big Cxx titles (see my previous post) and than they surround themselves with lemmings (Lemmingus Yesmenus).
There are two types we all should be aware of:
1. Lemmings of the first type are just there to nod and place the leaders on the pedestal. From time to time they will nip at some small details, but they will never dare to question the foundation of ideas. The effect this has on the organization, that is still forming, is that if your foundation has cracks, the business has a higher likelihood of toppling.
2. Second type of those lemmings are the gullible, young, inexperienced, but definitely bravado-laden types. They are fresh out of the school, they have zero comprehension of how things work in the real world, they are so pumped to go move mountains… but they have no idea where to start and they see these guys/gals with Cxx titles, so they assume those people must be geniuses. Those leaders must be towers of knowledge and experience. How else would they have gotten those huge titles?
If you are new investor, you will just have to make couple of bad investments until you can develop a good sense for those kind of teams… and than run like hell.
If you are founder(s)/leader(s) of startups, you need to watch your brainstorming and staff meetings. If the ratio of nodding heads, praises, and other ego-boosting actions is more than half (or worse – 100%), time to sit down and really get serious about your own choices. Are you more interested in being agreed with and put on the pedestal, or do you want to succeed and create that wealth for yourself, your investors, and your team? The key rule to remember is that you, as leaders of the company, need to be surrounded with the kind of people who make you feel that you got a lot to learn. If you think you are the smartest person in the room… you chose the wrong people. And never, I repeat NEVER, forget to always ask your team to question you, “devils advocate” is always a must. There are many methods available for facilitation of that kind of analysis. Edward de Bono has one good method called “Six Thinking Hats”, if you need to start somewhere.
Apolinaras is a business operations leader with 12-year track record of building scalable and capital-efficient operations for technology and professional services companies.