The 10x Leadership Framework for Growth in Large Organisations

Good afternoon, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, probably good night for some of you. My name is Paul O'Brien, and I'm going to say hello for a few minutes just to give others an opportunity to join us here on the Airmeet. Welcome. Certainly use the chat in the sidebar to introduce yourself and to make some connections with people. It's a pleasure to be here again on behalf of Founder Institute. Founder Institute hosts sessions like these rather regularly, every couple weeks, perhaps even every week. And so it's a wonderful opportunity for us to connect with other leaders in the startup ecosystem, other corporate innovators, and even investors. My work is primarily through what's called Startup Ecosystems, and I publish Startup Economist. I do a lot of research about different cities and regions of the world to help us understand how startup communities work, how they fail, and how we can improve upon them so that entrepreneurs throughout the world thrive a little bit more meaningfully. It's a special honor today to have joining us Mischa de Sturck, who is a specialist with regard to growth in large organizations. He's the author of The 10x Growth Machine. He's also the author of The Death of Average, which is a wonderful book that we've had a bit of a conversation about. And the reason I'm excited that we're hosting this conversation is that hopefully you all appreciate and increasingly appreciate, in particular thanks to AI, the fact that we're re-embracing, we're understanding again that a critical role that founders play in our ecosystem is the scale and growth of new opportunities, not just the development and the emergence of new solutions. We tend to refer to these as startups, but Misha's focus happens to be in large organizations and companies. And one of the directions that Founder Institute has been moving as aggressively as possible is recognizing and appreciating that there are founders throughout our economy, not just in the sense of people who start something such as a startup or a small business, but in fact, there are founders and entrepreneurs found throughout companies throughout the world, and these people could be better served. And better developed as leaders, entrepreneurs, and founders in their own right, perhaps starting something new within the company, perhaps moving on in the future and starting something of their own. So it's a great pleasure to welcome Misha to the stage. How are you? We're going to talk a little bit about how organizations cap that growth and what you can do about it. We're going to talk a little bit about what it means to end up being average when you don't want to be. And we're going to talk a little bit about leadership and how to 10x growth by being the kind of leader that makes that possible. One housekeeping issue before we get started. Go ahead. In addition to using the chat to introduce yourself and make some connections with people, go ahead and ask any questions that you have throughout our conversation. Misha is going to share some slides and some perspective on his work. Then he and I will have a bit of a discussion of his work, but we're going to open it as well to questions from you all. So drop those questions in the chat. Go ahead and use the Q&A function if you'd prefer that. Take a note of who's in chat and look for Cassio. Cassio's helping us behind the scenes and he's helpful to capture your questions, maybe respond to them directly, and certainly to help you get to know Founder Institute a little bit better. One of the easiest ways to get to know Founder Institute is to check out fi.co and in particular subscribe to the Insights blog, check out the events page and the programs page. Get a better sense for what we have coming up in the future. Mischa, how are you?

Very good, and thanks for having me. Very excited to share the new insights around leadership and driving the next growth, right?

So I'm looking forward to it too, because that's probably the best way to characterize it for everyone. We're constantly doing research in the economy and in companies and in startups and finding new research about personalities, culture, methodologies, ways that we can improve upon what we were doing even just last year. So I'm really looking forward to the talk that you have to share. Go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit better and then take it from there. As you're ready, bring up those slides and let's get going with what you want to share. And then we'll start that conversation, everybody, as soon as Mischa wraps up his talk.

Yeah, very good. Hey guys, thanks for having me again. Super nice to be here. This is I think one of my third webinars with the Founder Institute. Very grateful always to be present. Look, um, so my name is Michel de Sterck, as Paul mentioned. I'm working for quite a long time with, uh, with startups but also with a lot of large companies. Um, and one of the main questions, what is always driving my curiosity and passion, is how are we able to win in the market and how can we drive growth, right? In the end, companies need to grow If you're a small company or a large company, everybody's looking at your numbers and how do you perform and how can we make those numbers move in the direction that we would like to see. Now, um, for the people that know me, um, I have written quite a lot and do a lot of work around, let's say, more the hard stuff, which is metrics and processes and how to fund it and how to structure it. Which is all great. But the last 3, 4 years I've been working on this new topic for me, which is about leadership and culture, which is a bit of a slower process. But in our work with large companies and small companies, I mean, the people in the end drive the performance of your company. And that's the topic of today. Basically 3 chapters: why is it so difficult to grow? Then a couple of key pillars of my book, the new book, The Depth of Average, and the core components of it. And then 3, what has to do— what these pillars has to do for you as a leader. And on a short side note, when I talk about leader or leadership, for me that's a role, that's not a function. So it doesn't matter if you are a senior executive or you are a marketeer, or you are in any role in your company, we can all practice our role of leadership. So having that said, let's dive into the topic at hand. So the title is How Leaders Drive 10x Growth, and I already mentioned sort of the big question that is, that is in our company really on our mind is also why is it so difficult to achieve growth. And apparently in one of the studies, I think it was Boston Consulting Group, they researched that only 1 out of 9 larger companies achieve sustainable and profitable growth. So it's not that easy to maintain, but everybody is talking about it. Now there are a couple of internal reasons, um, When you are growing as a company, organizational complexity kicks in. You have matrix organizations, different layers. It might be that your entrepreneurial culture is more shifting towards a predictable culture, insufficient resources, certain capabilities that you might or might not have, and an inability to focus. Now, what's driving all these symptoms? And if you look at the common denominator, it's really leadership and culture. And we always say that average performance is not a market condition or outcome of processes. It's a leadership consequence. And there's a simple— I think it was a Chinese proverb that they say the recipe is as good as the chef. And it's a super simple sentence, but if you really think about it, I mean, You can have all the best tools and processes, but in the end, it's, it's about the people that drive it, right? So the recipe is as good as the chef. Another reason why it's so difficult to grow is that growth creates complexity, and complexity kills growth. And what is so interesting is that average performance comes slowly, right? It's happened— it's happening in meetings, it's compromise by compromise. Not even that everybody is so aware of that compromises are being made on a continuous level, but all these trade-offs together, they compound, right? And it slows down a system. And that is sort of the main question that we also start to, to ask, um, to our clients, like, where is in your company good enough become acceptable? Where, where are we not looking for a great performance? Why is it that difficult? What type of conflicts are we not having in a constructive manner? And this is just an example on why growth is more than in larger companies complicated. And this example is— everybody probably knows it— it's a stage gate process which moves you from an idea to post-launch review It's invented in the year 1986 by a smart guy called Robert Cooper. But the mistake is that many companies try to use StageGate to discover new growth, which it basically was never designed to do. So it's really about launching new products at scale. But so it's, it's fascinating that it's still widely applied for the wrong purpose. And when it comes to broken innovation, this leads to complex, slow, costly processes. It's a bit more waterfall, traditional, let's, uh, consumer process. The business cases are unproven and inflated, right? So we need to make a big business case to get the resources done, but in that way we also create expectations that are hard to achieve. We stake activity for progress in all these gauges— gates, because everything is still most of the time a desk research exercise. And we see that there's a lot of internal-based decisions instead of following real market data. And in that process, a lot of alignment needs to happen, but alignment is not the same as, as leading into a certain direction of which is good for the company. So there are differences between large-scale execution operating model and incubation, and I will not go through each of these details because that's not the main focus of this, this webinar. But on the top you see StageGate, which is more large-scale execution model based on predictability. And if you look at the business model, it's established and proven. The brand market is we need to protect the brand in an existing market. It's about budgets, short-term cash flow, 3-5 year plan, etc., etc. But now when we move towards the below, where we go for new growth opportunities, and most of the people might be very well acquainted to Lean Startup practices, right? Test and learn, rapid iteration, hypothesis-driven experiments, etc., etc. But this is really a different paradigm. And that is, that was the main thesis of, of my second book, 10x Growth Machine. Now, why is it then that still this previous one, Lean Startup-based operating model, which is all very quite known, and most of the large and small companies actually already do this here and there, um, But why is it that it's sort of not yet at scale, right? And I started to think about it, and I was reading a couple of interesting articles, and then I came across this, yeah, pretty mad but also simple statement, is that people prefer a problem they can't solve above a solution they don't like. And it really started to make me think. It's like, okay, there is definitely a point of truth in this sentence. So I started to dive a bit deeper. And why is this? So most of the time, um, it's about delaying the pain, right? The consequences of a problem will be probably felt more in the future. Well, to put it in place now requires some pain today. There is fear of uncertainty. I mean, we like the problems that we have, and there's a reason for that, because they are familiar. And we know what to expect, and there's a locus of control. So it's easier to accept the problem that we have than to accept the solution that requires conflict or change. So it's very interesting that as a human being, we have the capacity to be very rational and goal-seeking, and also the capacity to be nuts because we're not always doing what's needed to be done. So Why is it so difficult that growth— why is it so difficult to achieve growth? Now, it might be obvious for a snapshot of different reasons that I gave you, but it also comes to a conclusion that poor performance is not a cause, but it's a choice, right? So for me, 10x leadership is therefore first and foremost taking responsibility where others are hesitating. And I think that's sort of the leader's capacity to hold more tension than others, right, in the company. So a couple of relevant questions then is really like, are we doing, or am I doing my job in a way that I'm betting my job, right? Am I really pushing for the right things that need to be pursued? Isn't that the type of boldness German companies ask from their employees? And is playing safe really safe? So with a lot of large companies that I'm working with, there's always a cycle also of cost cutting, uh, and then after that there's a set of new initiatives. So I think it's good to reflect a bit on, on these couple of questions, and I have a couple of more questions in between. So also feel free to put your reflections in the chat, like Paul mentioned. Now, having all this said, what is then the biggest, or what might be the biggest competitive capability for companies nowadays? And it's difficult to point at one, but we gave it a try. And what we believe to see is that there's a tendency to go for more superficial fixes. So we see now again a lot of hype around new technologies like AI, which I personally really like, so don't get me wrong. But only implementing AI with— now without a fundamental restructuring an organization, it will not help you gain the performance that you're looking for. So resist shallow fixes. That means having the discipline to stay with the problem long enough. And apparently Einstein, which was for me very striking, he said like, and he was quite humble probably, because he said, look, I'm not much smarter than all the other people. I just like to stay longer in the problem. He just loves complexity. Um, And that gives you one advantage, is that you see what others can't and that you can also build what others won't. And that's, that's where I believe it comes together. Now, this book, for a reason I put it here again. So it's about these hard requirements, right? But at the same time, we saw in 2023 that many labs are closing, but also probably reopening again in a couple of years. There was actually a study done by a couple of scientists who, who basically identified a corporate venture building life cycle. I didn't know that existed, but it is something like this, is that at one point people say, look, we need to do something with innovation and more bolder innovation. Then people start enthusiastic adopting new approaches, labs are being opened, It's being funded. Year 1, everybody is excited. Year 2, people start to ask, hmm, is this maybe the right direction? And year 3, what's the return on investment? And then year 4, there is most likely another year 4. Now it's, it's interesting that there are a lot of lessons learned, which I also captured in that second book. But I also came to the fundamental conclusion that you can have the best processes, metrics, tools, etc., but that will not lead to the intended results. So what needs to happen is a fundamental reflection into the current patterns of thinking and doing within the company, because that is basically what keeps small and large companies in its existing place. Now then, we came to the thesis of the second part of the book, which is the second part of the webinar, which is the which is the, the main topic on how can we then drive growth and what does this mean from a leadership and cultural perspective. I will go in a couple of snapshots through the key building blocks to give you a taste of the thinking behind. And one of the main questions besides how can we achieve growth, um, it's also a bit like, but how can you build an extraordinary organization if you think and act like everyone else, right? If we always look to the competition for benchmarking, or we assume that somebody else is doing it better. So I always think that we also really need to change our thinking and, and our acting. Now, one of the key building blocks is direction, right? And, and sometimes you hear lofty slogans like progress over perfection or other types of things, which is true, but it's difficult. And in this book and in this work, we go behind the slogans and what's actually holding us back to get there, right? So first of all, uncertainty is not a face, it is the environment. So definitely looking at all the geopolitical changes and turmoil, that's a given for sure. Direction is about making choices before you have all the information. So progress is more important than making the right type of direction, because we don't know anymore from a cockpit what would the right direction be. Consensus does not equal the right direction. It's safe. And, and all these things has to do something with you as a leader, right? So That means that you need to be able to deal with ambiguous feelings this creates and own it instead of acting out. So what you see in practice is that at the moment difficult decisions are being made. We first look at the group and then it's difficult to have a different opinion than a group, right? So am I able to stand alone? Am I able not being blackmailed? Am I standing for my course? So these are quite tough things that will touch you as a person and how you feel. And that means that we need to develop a tolerance for fear, hate, and loneliness. Maybe not the most three happy emotions, but we all know they are always there, no matter if you're an entrepreneur like myself and many others. For an entrepreneur. In a large company, we need to get stuff done in the complex environment under uncertainty, and this requires a lot of people. And the difficulty is that the second building block is around empowerment, and we love to talk about empowerment and motivation, but without direction, it's very clear, it's very difficult to empower anybody, right? Because how am I going to be empowered if I don't know where I'm going? So empowerment is not something leaders give. It emerges when people are competent enough to take real responsibility for their decisions. Now, a couple of things that are relevant for empowerment, and the above one is 10x. It's also our company name, but it basically came from an interesting conversation I once had with, with a mentor of mine and an investor. And he basically said, look, you have a fundamentally different conversation if you need to raise 100 million instead of 10 million, right? So, and the point is that if we are not practicing ourselves to think big, it doesn't matter that we can start small because we always start small. But if we're not able to even think it, it will not happen, right? So conventional thinking, small thinking leads to smaller results. Per definition. Make it necessary for people to grow. Real colleagues don't let each other taking the path of least resistance, right? I mean, there should be some joy and pride in the work, and that we can grow, that we do a better job, that we make progress, and that you're proud of that. And another way is that we also need to embrace and love conflict a bit more, but in a constructive way. It doesn't have to be without respect. It can be very respectful, but if we want to empower, if we want to grow, there's always a tension that we need to manage. Accountability is around owner's mindset. So I use a bit the entrepreneurial language here, but I think a couple of things that are relevant is that I always sometimes feel that people mistake progress for activities. So I see a lot of super busy people and back-to-back meetings and many slides and many activities, but are we actually making progress in the right direction, right? That's sort of for me always the key thing on my mind. Are we doing the right things here? And we can report as much as we can, but it doesn't mean that we get the outcomes that we need. And you see there's a tendency also, because I've been part of a startup, I've been part of a scale-up, and I help large companies, is that from moving from a small company to a large company, processes will become more important. It will take a more dominant place. But as Steve Jobs famously said one day in one of his statements, that there is no magic in any process, right? If we institutionalize a process or institutionalize innovation within the process, it will not happen. Now, one of the questions here for the group, not to answer but more to think about, is if we need to become more empowered and accountable, set the direction, what type of constructive conflicts are we avoiding, or what are the ones that we actually should go in, right? In what way? And how could we do that in a way that we're achieving our goals? Because one of the important things is when we do not have conflicts is that we get a lot of unacknowledged fear, and that drives dysfunction. And there's a— I forgot her name, she's from the Harvard Business School— psychological safety. I think it was Amy Edmondson, not sure. But psychological safety, she coined this term, and it's very important because what it basically means is that there is a freedom to speak truth, to challenge assumptions, to disagree openly, to surface bad news without any fear or punishment. If you do not have such an environment in which leaders need to take the first steps, you will become more risk avoidance and performative compliance, self-protection. And these are basically all the natural enemies of 10x performance. And I think one other myth is that you will never eliminate fear, right? So I think a leader and an organization need to create conditions where fear can be named, where it can be explored and worked with, rather than denied or suppressed. Once this started to trickle down into my consciousness, once I was leading a scale-up and I had quite a team, and the way I started to do this is actually quite practical. On Monday or Tuesday, a bit early in the week, I asked my team captains basically what, what do they believe are the biggest tensions in their agenda of that week. Because I wanted to understand what would be the type of week, how could I help them in the best way. And it allows you to talk about things that are more difficult. So it's not rocket science, but it's just good to have these things in your mind that you can also start to do this if you feel like that. Now, innovation requires fast learning, experimentation, course correction. Experiments will fail, they don't fail. So what happens if there's not a safe environment? I literally have seen this a couple of times. Data can be manipulated, experimentation is avoided, all to, to make the picture towards management more attractive. But what looks like control becomes then collective self-deception on the inside. And that's of course a big watch out because that's where decline of businesses happen. And these two terms around safety and accountability, they go hand in hand, right? Because safety without accountability is very comfortable. Accountability without safety is is, yeah, leads to fear and compliance. So for us, it means as leaders on any level in our company is to tolerate disagreement, critique, and loss of control. Especially the last one sounds simple, but it's actually the opposite, right, on how to let go of control. And I will come back to that later for a moment. So if you look at a couple of these key building blocks, I touched upon direction, I touched upon empowerment, accountability, psychological safety, is if these things are start to come to life in the real behavior, in real conversations, you can also start to look at how can you create more autonomous teams. Right? Because if you have these criteria and prerequisites in, in place, um, you can start delegating responsibility and decision-making towards the teams closest to the customer, consumer, and the market, and not the highest in the hierarchy, because that will slow companies down. So speed and quality improve when reality informs decisions directly. But we need to work on these previous pillars in order to get to a point that we can actually say, well, we let the teams closest to the end consumer or end customer make the actual decisions based on the experiments that they have executed. Now, what does this now all mean for leaders? I touched upon these key pillars, but This has something to do with you as a person. You step into your work environment, can be a startup, can be a large company, you go to your team. So what does this mean for us as people to drive this change? So first of all, I think it has a lot to do with what I call inner work, right? I think leaders must examine their own relationship with fear, ego control. In psychology, psychological terms, you call it the shadow side. Um, there's a lot of detail in the book, and I can't go in all these details, but one of the things that struck me was a very famous psychiatrist said that people should go where their fear is just to know that it's not real, right? And you have also a lot of humorous variations on this. But I think it was very good advice. Entrepreneurs do this probably more naturally even, because you start to build something that doesn't exist, and there are many fears related to that. Does it work? Can I pay my rent now? Etc., etc. But also in large companies, it's challenging to always go for the right direction, right? And that leads to fear, but it means that you should not go away from it. But first, sort of, what does this fear try to tell me? Um, if that not happens, so it's very difficult that organizations cannot be psychologically safe if leaders are unwilling to hear uncomfortable truths about themselves. So what does this mean? And for the people that have been in formal leadership positions with a team and the responsibility of making decisions, etc. Power exposes what is unresolved. So sometimes they say power really corrupts the character, but I think it's a bit less heavy. It reveals it. And what you see is that authority removes friction, and without friction, unexamined tendencies—service, control, defensiveness, Impatience. I had personally, I had this impatience. I always think we could go faster now, etc., etc. Arrogance, avoidance, and every human being has different ways of coping with tensions. So what you see happening then is that leaders can mistake this positional power for leadership competence. And what happens is that they unconsciously use control to to manage their own anxiety. Well, and we know this from a well-known term called micromanagement, right? Nobody's really waiting for it, but it's a way to manage their own anxieties. So that's, that's the message of what happens when it's not reflected upon and worked with. And the other thing is that fear is always present. Fear of failure, irrelevance, loss of respect, exposure, And by not acknowledging it, it means not that the fear will disappear. It turns into, like I mentioned already, micromanagement, consensus-seeking, blame-shifting, politics, excessive rationalization, etc., etc. So it's not so much about becoming fearless, because we're all humans, but it's about— it's not about making sure that fear is running our organization. And I think that's sort of the most important thing. And then coming back to this letting go of power, letting go of control. And we say it all very easy during meetings or personal conversations, but it's actually a deeply personal thing because letting others decide means letting go of relevance, feasibility, sometimes aberration, I've witnessed this myself when we build a company. One of my co-founders, very charismatic guy, had really struggles to sort of— the nature of his role was really changing. He was less needed, and I've— I thought that was a great thing because it means that he was hiring the right people. And it's a great thing, and at the same time it's not a great thing, right? Because it's your baby now and everything. That goes with it. So leaders who resist empowerment are often unconsciously grieving the loss of importance. The inner work is learning to derive meaning from building capabilities in others. And I think that's sort of the, the central thing, right? Leadership is not about us, it's about how can I help and make sure that my other colleagues are growing in their role. What can we do to make that happen? This automatically means that we coming a bit back to our core message is that holding tension instead of resolving it prematurely. That is that innovation and growth, personal growth, business growth requires innovation of ourselves. It requires innovations of our processes. It requires innovation of our capabilities. And so we'll always create tension between old and new. Speed and quality, autonomy, coherence. And what happens if we cannot handle that tension? We start to make compromises. And there we go back to our initial thesis of the death of average, is that it's compromise by compromise, slowly, unconsciously happening till it compels to a point that we really need to step in and make very hard decisions. And what I believe is that if you start to practice holding these tensions and postpone judgment, better decisions need to be emerged. And so sometimes when things are very complicated or tense, people like to make fast decisions. It looks powerful, but it's basically to release that tension, right? It can be a very irrational decision. I may have very fast decision, etc., etc. We know these situations most likely. So self-leadership really sets the ceiling, right? And as a final statement, I believe that the organization that we have is the one that we deserve. I believe it truly reflects who we are as a person, who we are as a team, leadership team, And that's, that's why I believe the self-work is such an important thing. And then my final closing question before we go to a Q&A and other types of questions. So what are we asking our organization to do that I'm not willing to model myself yet?

You end, you end, Misha. Yes, that was the end. On where, yes, on where my head was most frequently throughout your conversation with folks. And by the way, everyone, please drop questions in chat or use the Q&A. I've got a great one from James. Thank you for that, James. I'll get to it shortly. Misha, you had in my head this emergence or this appreciation of culture. Uh-huh. And you kind of ended on that, right? What kind of organization do we actually want to have? And we do hear about the importance of culture a lot, especially in my world, right? Startup ecosystem, entrepreneurship, the fact that it's such a unique slice of the economy and even society, that culture, culture is a big part of it. Can you talk a little bit more about how we know culture is such an important correlation with leadership in particular? Because, because we know, we know culture is important in a company. Obviously, we talk about corporate culture all the time. But, but what's— what are you seeing ties excellence in leadership and being able to grow organizations to a much greater extent with culture in particular? And can you share some more thoughts on how to help develop that or explore it more?

Yes, it's a really good question. We can spend a lot of time on that question, but let's say culture is the— if we would define culture, there are many different definitions, but I always see it as also what happens when I'm not around. So what is the difference between what people say and what people do? What are things that are not spoken about? What are things that are not being felt on purpose within large companies or smaller companies? So culture has a good side of it, things that we sometimes have a family culture, right, in companies, or sometimes different, but it always has a shadow side. And the, the job of a leader is to address the flip side of the culture. So if we have a very polite culture where people like to collaborate, um, what is it that we are not addressing in that culture that is not helping us to make the progress that we need to make? A lot of people, for example, also like to talk about trust, but what about distrust in our company, right? Right? Who are the people that are talking about each other and not with each other? And I think that's where the leaders step in, right? To model that behavior on what type of company you want to be together, right? And as a founder, it's even so critical because you have a starting— yeah, you are the culture, right? So you have the, um, you have the responsibility and the opportunity to, to develop a culture in which you feel that this is where people can grow, where we drive performance, where we are proud of what we do, etc., etc.

You're, you're touching on both the challenges of neglecting culture and, you know, the, the bad, the bad issues, the uncertainty of what's going on. Let me, let me weave in James's question. So thank you, James. And, and by the way, John and Stan, I got you as well. So appreciate the James Cabugna, thank you. Do you have any suggestions, Misha? Do you have any suggestions about a tool, maybe a platform that people can use to leverage leadership frameworks, your leadership frameworks, to help create or help manage organizational culture? Any solutions or tools or platforms that might help with that?

So I think there are many good tools. And tools for me can be, especially when it comes to leadership, sort of to get a better sense of your personal tendencies, right, as a potential leader. And so for my second book, I've made a whole workbook with 40 more exercises for yourself. But for example, Manfred Kämpffries, who has done very interesting work on the leadership shadow, they have a lot of interesting tools there to sort of to understand, um, if I put pressure on you, what will you do? And what type of Misha or Paul or anybody else do we get to see? And is this, and is this the, the type of behavior that's actually helping, or does it require some reflection? So I'm less familiar with all new technological tools, but I'm very familiar with all types of tools around self-leadership assessments, etc., etc.

Let's talk a little bit more about the, the challenge of average and how average gradually trickles in. Your book, The Death of Average, I think is probably a great read for, for, for absolutely everyone. And, and again, I'm coming at it more so from the founder startup lens, coming at it from the corporate lens to an extent. How do— how might you guide folks to, you know, are there 3 or 4 distinct things that you could guide everyone to look for to make sure that they're avoiding becoming that average, that they're falling into that trap of not being distinct and not being exceptional in some way? Any thoughts?

Yeah. So I think One is, um, what, what are the people not telling you? If you are a formal leader in a younger company, that the people are not bringing to you or not telling you, and is that something that should be on the agenda? It has to do with discussing the tensions more regularly, like how difficult will this peak become, uh, what type of difficult conversation do you have with clients or internal or et cetera. Sort of, I think that sort of makes that more transparent and, and talkable, right? That's a start. I think the other one is, um, is actually quite simple, is that, uh, ask more questions, right? Um, and, and dare to listen to each other, right? There's something I also mentioned a bit in the book here and there, but sometimes I'm in meetings and, and we try to convince each other of our own standpoints, right? But we do not really have an engaged conversation. I'm just trying to convince you, Paul, and you try to convince me. But what if I would actually listen? I might learn something from that, and that's scary, right? Or maybe I need to change my own thoughts. So that's, that's a second one. Yeah. And then I would say a third one is that set— I would also say set bigger goals, right? So if you are afraid of particular things, can be a new skill, it can be anything from small to big, doesn't really matter, but make that explicit as part of your, your plan to develop, right? Do stuff that you find a little bit scary You try to get a bit outside of the popular comfort zone, as many people might be familiar with that term. You don't overly want to stretch that into an anxiety domain, but if you're not stretching yourself, then we're not learning, right? And then the death of average is also around the corner.

So, Stan, Stan Baremski, thank you, has a great question. Related to that direction. And I think anyone who's worked for a company has felt this pain that you're certainly right. Ask questions, right? Open yourself up to listen and to talk with people, to share things. A lot of leaders, or perhaps more accurately, managers, are not often comfortable with that, right? That a lot of— A lot of challenge in a company is actually risk mitigation, right, which is why there's such a distinct difference between a startup and a company that we need to avoid creating too much risk. And so it can be tough to develop culture. It can be tough to be a leader. Stan's question, how would you encourage influencing other leaders in the organization to get on the same page, to follow the same patterns that we're talking about here? Any thoughts about that?

Yeah, so it's not so much about me trying to influence the other in behaving in a way I feel it's appropriate. It's more that I think therefore direction is sort of the first key pillar, is that we need to know where we are going. I think Alice in Wonderland asked the cat in this famous fairy tale, like, where do I need to go? And then, well, the cat basically said, if you don't know where to go, it doesn't really matter which direction you take. So I believe that is sort of first, if we don't know where we are going, like truly going, it's difficult to assess if we have the right type of behaviors and then all other things in place to get there, right? So that's sort of point one. And there's a lot of misalignment, I can tell you, in that first part already. Where do we actually play? Where do we not, etc.? These more strategic questions. If we do not have between founders, also from my own experience, not have this deep alignment on where we go, there's already the first blocker, right? And from there it will become more difficult to continue. Now look, if you have alignment on that, let's say we agree where to go and we, we are passionate about the direction that we are taking, then of course still there's always something that you need to solve, right? Multiple problems, challenges, etc. And What I always think is that what is always a good thing is if people do not try to listen or not want to listen, is that you use silence a bit more strategically. So you need to try that if in a conversation that you have with somebody else and it's going a bit irrational or a bit whatever term you would like to give it, just be silent, don't react and see what they will do because If you do not, if you fill up the silence, you're basically stimulating that other person to continue in the way they are. So silence is a very underestimated powerful tool that we can use a bit more tactical in our conversations with each other.

Yeah, I think you did. Stan, weigh in again, by all means, in chat. And Cassio, catch you here or or we'll unpack it a little bit more. Let me shift us a little bit because John, thank you, John Carfagno. Let's talk about employees, because very pertinent question since we're talking about growth, perhaps growth from a startup stage indeed to a company, or even just a company becoming much more substantial. John asks, is it better to hire employees based on, based on the exact customer size and revenue, based on the size of the customer market, I imagine is what John's referring to, or to hire a slightly higher percentage of employees compared to what you need so that you can keep the organization running smoothly and efficiently as possible while you're growing. And John, if I may, I'm going to interpret that a little bit just to make sure we know what you're asking. I think you're asking if we want to kind of hire more in advance of growth to make sure that those employees are on board and they're trained and they're part of the culture and so forth, I believe. So, Misha, thoughts about that? How do you discern how best and when to hire people? Yeah, that's a good point.

So I had the problem myself of growing faster than I could hire at one point in a particular setting. Which is a problem. And for me, it required to say no, which is super difficult if you are an entrepreneur. So I also had my personal challenges with many different things. Um, so my learning from this is that, um, let's say, understanding if you have a repeatable product-market fit, right, sort of more technical fit in terms of do I have repeatable sales, can I scale, etc. If I sort of find this pattern, you start to hire before you start to grow, right? The problem is, is that with most companies, they don't really know how to sell in a repeatable way, right? Can I sell to this customer segment for this lifetime value with this cost of acquisition? Now it becomes a bit more technical, um, but if, if I have this clear proof points, you start to hire before you grow. So that would definitely be my goal now if I would be in that same position. And then make sure you onboard them right, that you spend time together, also in the culture, spend explicitly time on culture. What type of behavior is appreciated? What do you like to see from each other, et cetera, et cetera.

What leadership qualities do you look for? And more importantly, what do you find is most often missing This, thanks to OPM. Thank you, OPM. What leadership qualities do you find are most often missing when you're starting to scale or you're trying to scale an organization more rapidly?

Leadership skills when scaling that are missing in particular is the question.

You know, I think that's a good one because you touched on, you touched on a lot of the maybe personality traits, right? More risk tolerant, more open, more forward-thinking, uh, inquisitive, right? They ask questions. But are there other skills or leadership qualities that you find are missing in being able to scale?

Yeah, I think it's a super good question, and I think yes. Um, so I think there's, um, it comes a bit back to the point we made in the presentation, is that especially when you're a fast-growing company or a growing company— doesn't have to be fast— or a very large company. All these situations have challenges, um, but there's not enough, uh, being discussed about how much pressure this actually gets or puts on people. So I had my own experience when our company was growing quite fast. Our people were a bit stretched across many different projects. Now, probably people will recognize this But then it's super crucial that there is an open line and conversation about what is the pressure for upcoming week, where do you see the difficulties, do you have an idea on how to solve that, that there is this leadership skill also of identifying which people are, you know, having difficulties with managing that pressure and where you need to help them. And so I think this emotional intelligence, maybe that's the skill or the whatever you call it. I think that's sort of a key thing to develop. Yeah, I think that's a key thing. If I look at my old self a couple of years back, I wish I had a bit more of that emotional intelligence sometimes with my team. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But you get older.

When we look back, I just had the pleasure of hearing about Bill Gurley's new book about finding the right career for you, and it was rather interesting how he correlated the fact that, you know, most of us actually have a midlife crisis in our 40s because we look back and we realize, ah, if only If only I had favored what I was more passionate about. If only I was more curious about the things that I loved. If only I had that emotional intelligence to work with people, right? Things would be very different now. And now I have to change things because I'm at the halfway point in my life.

And probably what is important also as a skill, have a bit of humor indeed, right? Because if there is— Yeah, it's important, right? Because if Sometimes organizations are so seriously occupied with themselves that there is no space for any relativism, right? For a bit of humor. And I think that's an important thing.

It's an important thing because I'd even add to it that I think what we find in startups, and this is certainly true of very successful corporations because you pointed out some of the people, right? We know who Steve Jobs is. What we tend to find among The start class is this underappreciation of the fact that a company is really you. That with AI, by the way, Sheena, I see your question about AI, so we'll get to that. With AI, we're seeing this shift to what's referred to as authenticity in content, in video, in articles, in newsletters, in news reporting. We're realizing that if AI can generate this content, well, What I really want to do is I really want to have a relationship with Misha. I want to be able to talk to Paul and everyone. The same is true of your startup. The same is true of a company or being a leader, that if you're not accessible, if you're not— you don't have a sense of humor about things not always going well, right? If you're difficult to work with, right? That's what establishes the relationship that your employees and customers in the market have with your brand. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so, so she asks a question pertinent to this. With, with AI coming on so quickly, do, do any leadership skills change? Or are any, are there any leadership skills required to, to work through change management, to work through AI, to work through growth? Yeah, because of this technology coming on and being available to everyone.

Yeah, it's coming a bit. And all that we mentioned before is still relevant also in that context of AI and how AI will change the workplace. But there's a thing I mentioned in the, in the, in the presentation is loss of relevance. And I think that's, that might be a key topic. Sometimes true, sometimes fear, right? Sometimes it's also not real, but it's, I think it's critically important, especially when you are in a company and/or industry that can be sensitive to being disrupted by AI, is that, that, or seeing opportunities, right? Because it's first disruption, first it's an opportunity, and later it becomes a threat. But I think it's important to, to sort of transition and guide your people in what does it mean for them to stay relevant and grow when agents and/or other technologies— and I don't know how fast and where this will go with AI, I think nobody has a— how can I use this situation in order to— what type of skills are becoming more and more relevant? How do I transition towards that new type of person, maybe with different types of skills and capabilities? And there's a lot of fear behind and uncertainty And that needs to be addressed first before you start talking about, hey Paul, why don't you go for a new course of XYZ, right? Because then you might, you know, you might freak out like, oh, is he gonna fire me if I'm not going to do that? So I think the, again, this emotional undertone needs to be addressed and being discussed.

There is a tremendous amount to be said for leaders being comfortable with and curious about both fear and uncertainty. Because you're right, believe it or not, everybody— employees, customers— they're drawn to that, right? That means that you're being creative. It means you're being innovative. It means you're trying to find solutions for things rather than just being stuck, as Misha has been sharing, in being average. Let me wrap us up a little bit there just for the sake of time from for the sake of the audience and everyone here. Folks, by the way, if you notice the message from Cassio, we will be hanging out longer. Airmeet has this wonderful networking feature where we can continue to have a conversation. So we're going to wrap up the talk and the presentation at this point, in particular because thank you everyone for the questions that you fed to us. Hopefully I got through everybody's questions for the discussion that we're having. If you can stick around for another half an hour, everyone, please do so. We'll just transition right into this networking platform. Just sit tight for a second. It'll flip us all over to that, that infrastructure. I want to thank you all for being here. On behalf of Founder Institute, make sure you hit fi.co, in particular if you are interested in being a mentor or a program director, or if you're working for a company or you have an idea and you just want to learn how to be a founder, you want to learn what this takes. That's what Founder Institute does in spades exceptionally well in hundreds of cities throughout the world. And so take a peek at fi.co and certainly hit the Insights blog and the event page for more talks like this. Misha, thank you very much for the sake of this time right now. Great to see you here. Any parting thoughts as we transition over?

Let's go through it. No, no, I shared a lot of thoughts. Let's go through it.

Let's go through it. Everybody connect with both Misha and I on LinkedIn and hop over with us right now onto the Airmeet networking event if you'd like to continue to have a conversation with us. Otherwise, thank you for being here, everybody. We'll see you in the next one. Thank you. Bye-bye.