by Eric Britten
Today, the Value Forward Network held a teleseminar on the title subject. I did not attend, but the title grabbed my attention as it points out a fairly common flaw in business today.
Entrepreneurs and professional business managers are two very different types of businesspeople. Entrepreneurs are skilled at identifying new business opportunities and parlaying them into going enterprises. They create a new enterprise, venture or idea and assume virtually all accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The very traits and attributes that make entrepreneurs good at entrepreneuring often doom them as good operating executives.
Good CEOs, COOs and business managers have diferent traits that make them good at managing and growing an established enterprise. Among their strengths are leadership, team building, focusing on performance, balancing risk and reward, financial acumen, credibility, good communications and people skills. The traits that make them good operators often can make them poor candidates for entrepreneuring.
And yet, how often do we see the CEO who founded an organization, navigated it through the rocky waters of start up, took risks on a daily basis to gain a foothold in their market, wrangled with venture capitalists and single-handedly created something from nothing struggling to run the established business? Think of Steve Jobs, who was fired by the very board he established as co-founder of Apple. Today he says it was the best thing that ever happened to him. But, had his board not removed him, what havoc might he have wreaked?
Knowing when to find good competent managing executives to run the enterprise is a struggle for those who start up a business. Often, it is someone else who must point out reality to them as they are still too busy entrepreneuring inside an organization that now needs a different kind of leader.
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