Five years ago my son’s business was destroyed. I saw it in his eyes, he believed he had failed us.
I felt that I had failed him. I had 4 decades working on turnarounds, workouts, split-ups, acquisitions, sales and startups. Clearly I missed something.
His firm was destroyed because it was a success.
To find out how this happened to my son, I dropped everything to pursue answers -- for 3 years I reviewed my cases, researched, and wrote. I wrote Oddballs/Misfits: the entrepreneur’s war with himself and corporatism. The entrepreneur’s success is a threat to others.
Success is not by management or capital; these are acquired by success. For the oddball entrepreneur, management stops success. Management means conformity. If they try to conform, they lose touch, their deep skill and natural differentiation. I could also see that conformity was the underlying source of bad economic timing, even when that threat was easily foreseeable.
We had longed for the day when the mundane aspects of finance would be solved by cheap hardware and software. An even better day is here--outside data is copious and affordable, and we have the skills and tools to dig through inside data. Experience is limiting, and emotion-tagged experience limits it further; what everybody believes to be true [conformity] places its own severe restrictions. Today, with the tools and the information we can lift the blindness.
My son’s destruction showed me that resistance to the entrepreneur doesn’t come from the threat of failure. It is the threat of success because success disrupts the models and expectation of others. (Indeed. The entrepreneur’s only true fans are the customers whose expectations are met and exceeded.) For my son, I had missed this peculiar phenomena of resistance arising from the threat of success.
Now the last piece is in place. We are ready for his next thing and yours.