Bill Gross breaks down four essential roles in companies: Entrepreneur, Producer, Administrator, and Integrator. He argues startups fail without complementary skills and mutual trust between these roles, using a window anecdote to show how conflict arises when one type dominates.
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So, there are obviously a million ways of measuring the different personality types of people. This is one particular taxonomy: the entrepreneur, the producer, the administrator, and the integrator. No person is just one of those four. Everybody is a blend of all of these talents, but everybody is dominant in one and has weaknesses in the other. So, I'm clearly an entrepreneur. I really love inventing the new thing, seeing things in the distance, and trying to do things ahead of their time. The producer is the person who actually makes things happen, who actually takes a product and executes on it, who sells it, all the execution stages to get it in customer's hand. I'm very high on the E. I'm actually moderate on the P. There are some entrepreneurial types who have no P and they're just not good at that or even negative. They get in the way of getting things done. That's actually okay. As long as they find someone else to complement them who is good at getting things done and then has mutual trust and respect for them so that together as a team they can get things done. But you have to get the P in the company as well. Then the administrator, that's a little bit more the bureaucrat. You have to have that in the company too to succeed. It sometimes gets in the way of things, but it also helps organize things. The administrator puts systems in place and helps the trains run on time and keeps the wheels on the bus when things are going crazy, when orders are going gangbusters, and it helps. Any one of these skills Taken to extreme is a negative. But any one of these skills in the right balance with others is exactly what you want. The final skill, the Integrator, that is the person who is more of a people person, who understands the other 3 people there and helps those other 3 people, those 3 talents get along because very often those other 3 talents hate each other's guts. Sometimes the E hates the A. Almost always the P hates the A. The P wants to get things done and the A is trying to put a system in place. And you really need to have all of them. I'll just give you an example just so you can sort of self-classify yourself and your strengths and weaknesses on these different things. Imagine that there are those 4 personality types sitting together in a room. There's a window over there and we're looking out. The window is over there and there's some dirt on the window. The E looks at the window and says, "Look over there. There's a parking lot. We could build a building that could—" He sees all of this stuff in the future. Doesn't even see the window. The P looks at the window and says, "There's a scratch on that window. That window is dirty. We better clean that, take care of that." The A looks at the window and says, "You know, we can make a form and people could fill out when they see something wrong and then they'll turn that in and that will go in a queue and then we'll get that taken care of." And the I looks at that and says, "I wonder what those three people are thinking." It really is true. There are many people— I don't do it enough on the I. I have some I but not enough. I try and always hire an I at the company where the I is actually more worried about what other people are thinking and feeling than the actual product or execution or customer. But that's hugely important. The I is the person who sits in a room when the P is screaming at the A and says, listen, you both have a point here. The P wants to get this done and the A says, let's do this. How about if we do— and bridges the gap. That's an important skill for a CEO to have as well, of course, to try and bridge that balance. But it's really important to try and find balance in the company and all those skills. Let me show you an example of what happens. In a company that doesn't have all those because I've seen this many times and this is one of the things we learned after so many companies. I mean, think about this. We've had 100 companies in 15 years, probably 150 CEOs, probably say 3 rounds of financing each, so 300 rounds of financing and all the problems and challenges and products and delays and all the things. The companies that made it had all these skills and balance and the companies that didn't, didn't. Let me give you the very— Specific example. So, a company always starts with the E. An I can't start a company. An A can't start a company. The company starts with the vision of the E person, the entrepreneurial person. The company starts out with that E and it's sort of making forward progress. It's going up, sort of up and to the right because there's a vision there. But then very quickly, if the E just has vision and can't execute anything, the thing just fizzles out and turns into nothing. It has to bring this P skill into the company at some point. It could be in a week. It could be in a month. It could be in a year. But at some appropriate point, before the idea fizzles out, some P skill has to happen in the company. Now, it could be a solo entrepreneur who is an E who also knows how to program or knows how to build or knows how to do whatever. So, that can be in the same person. But it's got— that skill has got to be there. And it's usually better if it's in another person who really gets along with the E. It really is great when there's a team who gets along. But then eventually, even if the company starts producing things and starts selling things and starts going, it eventually too will fail if it doesn't get some system in place to be able to Handle the order, get the money in the bank, pay the bills, pay the employees. Those are all A-like functions. But there are many other A-like functions that have to happen to make the company get past that stage. But even then, a company will eventually fail because everybody will be at war with one another unless there's enough I skill in the company to keep the company going up. One of the things that I wish I had learned when I was in college and life anywhere was what this I skill even was and how to learn more about it myself. I never had a class on how to to do the conflict resolution between people when they are having problems or even to see good ways of giving people feedback, that's a very, very valuable skill to make a successful company. If you look at some of the really, really incredible companies, they almost always had great teams of people, sometimes a duo, sometimes more at the top who really, really had opposite skills but really, really got along, had such mutual trust and respect for one another that you really got the best out of both of them. You never had any war between them. That really is amazing when that happens. If I were to have any single thing that I would recommend for success in a company, it would be this after, of course, having a decent idea. But I even think this is more important than having a decent idea because this team working together can take a not-so-decent idea and turn it into a decent idea because they'll have a method to get from not decent to incredible, whereas a great idea will usually fizzle if it doesn't have all this together. So that's one thing that I learned very painfully. I wish I had learned it earlier in my career, I could have made some things that weren't successful successful. But I really urge it. A lot of this learning came to me from a consultant named Itzhak Adizes, who first thought about this in the life cycles of companies and the different stages that companies go through. You can plot this either in time or at stage of revenues or things like that. But there is a great degree of flexibility. I'm just saying, I'm repeating it a lot of times because I think it's so important, get complementary skills in your startup. It's very, very valuable.
