The Vision Thing

A well-known entrepreneur turned VC, who will go unnamed because I am not sure he would want me to share this conversation publicly, once told me “if you remove a founder, you must sell the company within a couple of years or it will start to decline in value.”

I don’t entirely agree with that and my experience with it has been different, but it brings up an incredibly important topic about leadership.

I like to keep things simple and in my simple mind, leadership comes in two flavors, visionary leadership and operational leadership. Founders are almost always visionaries (if they aren’t, run in the opposite direction) and hired CEOs are almost always operators.

What this VC was saying is that once you replace visionary leadership with operational leadership, the Company will stop innovating and start to lose value. I agree completely that companies that stop innovating will start to lose value. What I don’t agree with and have seen first hand, is that you can have a team that can provide both operational and visionary leadership.

Leaders who can provide both operational and visionary leadership are a rare but special breed. When you find one, get on their bus and stay on it for as long as you can. It will be an incredible trip.

It is also the case that you can pair visionary leadership with operational leadership and I have seen that model work very well for long periods of time. Most commonly, the visionary leader is “in charge” and the operational leader runs the business on a day to day period. That can be an Executive Chairman (visionary) and a CEO (operator) or it can be a CEO (visionary) and President/COO (operator). Most commonly in this model, the visionary leader is the founder and the operator is a hired executive.

Small early-stage companies can succeed without operational leadership but not forever. That is why founders who are great visionaries but weak operationally can be very successful for a while at least. Once a company gets into the hundreds of employees and is headed to the thousands, it needs operational leadership and this is where many visionary founders struggle. And this is when operational leaders are hired and the work starts to find the right long-term sustainable operating model.

Some founders are this rare breed of visionaries who can operate too. Most are not. So this work to find the right pairing is critical and is a lot of the work that board members do with the founders and their leadership team in startups.

But going back to my friend and his advice that I started this post with, it is true that operational leadership alone will not get the job done. And it is also true that operational leaders will have a hard time getting “the vision thing” from below. It has to come from the top. Operational leadership, fortunately, does not.