A founder reflects on working for authoritarian leaders who made swift, unilateral decisions and expected instant execution. That environment taught him to act fast and take direct responsibility. Large corporations, by contrast, get stuck in committees and fear, which paralyzes decision-making.
Chapters
I actually worked for those kind of people most of my life. It was really late in life where I decided to do my own business. I always worked for one of these entrepreneurial-led companies, dictator running the company, and that was really where they made a decision, do this, do that. They had board meetings basically while they were shaving in the mirror in the morning. That kind of a situation of working for those kind of people gave me the personality of just reacting quickly and making decisions and going forward, rather than working for a super big corporation where you're 15 levels down and you had to go through committees and have meetings and talk about things all the time. Nobody wanted to make a decision because they'll be afraid of getting scolded or fired. I worked always in an environment where there's a powerful boss. You just have to work around the clock to get something done, and there was no excuse. You couldn't say, I can't do it, I'm not going to do it, I can't get it done in that kind of time. You just had to do it. My upbringing in the business world was always working for a very strong, powerful personality.
