Last week we finished our Designing the Leading Entrepreneurial Organization class, taught by Diane Burton (one of the best and more energetic professors at Sloan). It has been one of the most interesting classes I have taken at Sloan. In part it is about the organizational decisions you make during the early days of a company (compensations, organization, culture, flow of information, hierarchies, rewards, recruiting, equity distribution, level of outsourcing, mechanisms for decision making, etc.) and the big impact these decisions have later on. The class was not about what was right or wrong, but about understanding the pros and cons and tradeoffs of these decisions (with a lot of class discussions).
Two quotes that I often heard in this class and in different entrepreneurial courses/talks/discussions:
- "Do you want to be king or do you want to be rich?". It gets to this essential trade-off around what drives an entrepreneur: Is it the need to control the company (that is, to be King), or is it the drive for success, particularly financial success (Rich), which may require that the entrepreneur step aside once certain business milestones have been reached (more info here)
- "Built to flip or built to last", i.e., building enduring companies (creating a culture, being cost efficient) or making decisions to build quickly to the level that you can be acquired (VCs need their start-ups to exit). The organizational decisions to build the company are very different (more info here).
Another thing she mentioned a couple of times and I like is that in real life (as opposed to university), nobody tells you the level of expectation of your deliverables.
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