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The third phase of a company’s growth is maturity. This is exemplified by the greatest businesses in the world.
Maturity is not the inevitable end product of Infancy and Adolescence. The best companies started out that way. The people who launched them had a clear understanding of what they were going into. Although they must go through the first two phases, they go through them in a completely different way.
What makes a person who starts a Mature business is his Entrepreneurial Perspective.
ACCORDING TO ITS FOUNDER, Tom Watson, IBM achieved success because of three reasons. First, he had a clear vision of what the company would look like. Next, he had a picture of how IBM would act. Finally, he knew that if they didn’t begin to act that way from the start, they would never get there.
It’s been decades since Tom Watson talked about the reasons behind his company’s success. While IBM is now in trouble and hardly a model for any business owner to follow, it would be different if Watson were still alive. He would have been involved in IBM’s reinvention to respond as the future demanded.
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AN ENTREPRENEURIAL Perspective takes on a wide and expansive scale. It sees the business as a system of integrated parts that creates a specifically planned result, a systemic way of doing business. There’s a standard for the business and it functions in accordance to rules and principles.
In contrast, a Technician’s Perspective is narrow and limited. Not seeing the connection between where his business is now and where it is going, he abandons any meaning and higher purpose of his work. Steps are done because of the need to do them. Not having the visionary guidance and larger scale apparent in the Entrepreneurial Model, he is left to build a model based on past experience. This is the exact opposite of what he needs to free himself and the business from work he’s been used to doing.
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL Model is a business model that satisfies the needs of a specific sector of customers in an innovative way. It recognizes that how things are done in a business is more important than what’s done.
An Entrepreneurial Model starts with a picture of the customer for whom the business is to be made and not of the business itself. It recognizes that no business can succeed without a clear image of its customers.
On the other hand, The Technician looks at his skills and finds a way to sell them. The result is a business that focuses on what it sells and not the way it is marketed nor the customers to whom the product is sold. Such business is intended to fulfill the owner and not its customers.
So how can we present the Entrepreneurial Model to The Technician in such a way that he can understand and make use of it? Unfortunately, we can’t.
What we must do instead is to give the entrepreneur in each of us a business model that is so exhilarating that it inspires our entrepreneurial personality to escape from The Technician’s bonds. If the model is to work, The Technician and The Manager need their own models at the same time. It must be balanced and inclusive so that the three personalities find the right work to do.
To find such a model, we should analyze the Turn-Key Revolution.
