Why founders fail: the product CEO paradox

Having that experience gives him a much better rapport with employees because they know he has been in their position, but also helps him make better decisions that affect those employees.

No.. it tells you this person is a lower risk than someone without a track record or a worse track record.

History is filled with people and companies who had a string of successes followed by failures. Those people weren't talented one day, and untalented the next.

EDIT: I've heard that "they" can be used.

Not every thought needs to be immediately vocalized

So if you say, wouldn't it be cool if we made (product x) out loud, and it is related to something your company might do, don't be too shocked if someone in your company hears you and then does it. If you weren't serious, and that person has spent 20 hours working hard on it, you will now come to two conclusions. 1. You have wasted their time and your money 2. You now have to disappoint a hard working, dedicated employee. You can't do that too often or they get frustrated and leave.

So in my experience, when you have only ad hoc, verbal only meetings about product, you will get bad results. I have made this error myself in the past. If I want a good result from my staff, I have to give them clear, written direction so that they can follow it and not need to continually check with me.

You may once in a great while get a product you make a profit on, but it is the exception and not the rule. It shouldn't take you so long to write out the new idea that you should try to save time by blurting it out. Simply tell your people what the idea is, and how it fits in with their previous priorities. Toyota uses a sheet of A3 to propose ideas. The constraint helps produce clearer direction. http://a3thinking.com/faq.html

Here's the thing, though: if you can be misunderstood you will be misunderstood. As those often-microscopic misunderstandings compound, people lose a sense of direction. As a founder you'll be repeating yourself and the core values and mission of the company over and over and over again until you want to throw up. This becomes more true as the company grows. A small company often operates more like a hive mind where there's a huge amount of implicit, shared understanding.

My personal strategy is this. In a normal situation if I have a clear idea of what I think should be done, get the key stakeholders into a room to Solve Problem X. Insist that before they get into the room they think about some ideal ways to solve Problem X. If necessary, constrain the solution space by giving high level priorities. Once in the room, have folks share their thoughts.

As CEO you should grill their ideas as intensely and rigorously as possible. You should have a fuller set of facts than they do (hopefully), which means you should be able to see holes they don't.

Most of the time -- assuming you've hired smart people -- your idea or something close to it is one of the ideas that staff brings up. It might even be an improvement on your idea. If that happens, great! You're done. Nobody needed to know you had the same idea and Jane Doe Staffer gets credit for a good idea.

More often than you'd expect, someone else brings up an idea that simply never occurred to you in the first place. This idea would never have surfaced if you started the conversation with your thoughts.

This is win-win-win. The good idea wins. Jane wins because she was empowered to come up with a good idea and saw it realized, which means she'll be excited to do it again in the future. The team wins because they see you're the kind of person who accepts and integrates good ideas. As Harry Truman said, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."

If the idea doesn't come up then you might introduce your own or guide the conversation in a way where folks in the room think of it, e.g., there's some fact you have that nobody else does. This is my strategy for normal situations. In exceptional situations, e.g., there's something incredibly urgent, different rules apply. Your staff will be much more inclined to follow your lead in that situation, though, if they see and understand it as an exception.

But if you walk into a room and bring up your idea first, it sets the tone and inevitably everything will be a variation on whatever you said. Even worse, the folks in the room will take what you said as The Law™ even if you didn't intend it to be that way. As a CEO or founder your words inherently carry more weight than anyone else's.

Please tone down the rhetoric; this isn't healthy for you or the women you purport to defend.

I then suggest you are promoting a biased view. Some people alternate between him and her, some just refer to the person in a way that does not indicate the sex (this CEO, the founder...)

Somehow, I prefer the latter, because it's simply trying to present arguments without reference to sex, instead of "using language to erode stereotypes about the types of people involved in tech enterprise", which could also be called "performing propaganda using newspeak" (and that is less politically correct of course)

EDIT: as noted below, «If "she" is not allowed to fail, then "she" is not accepted as an equal to the "he" is able to fail with spectacular results.» - spot on

There are a few nice features of writing vs. talking in person. First, it makes it less likely two people will take what you said differently. Second, it immediately creates a shared vocabulary. Third, it creates an artifact that can both be revisited and shared with new folks entering the company. Fourth, everyone knows everyone else knows. Even if what you're saying is totally innocuous, if you tell Person A but Person B finds out you told Person A before you can tell Person B yourself (maybe they were out sick that day, whatever), you run the risk of people seeing an "inner circle" and an "outer circle." "Knowing first" can become a kind of very counterproductive gold star.

I think those are more like the reasons he was advocating for writing rather than some obsession about process per se.