“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” - N. Mandela.
Posted to LinkedIn on 23 July 2024
Cool, complex, and innovative businesses may only be created by smart, free, well-motivated people who trust each other. These are people who choose you as a leader much more than you may choose them, and these are people whose respect is hard to earn, easy to lose…and impossible to forget. In short, a potentially perfect recipe for inter-personal problems. However, creativity is not born in top-down verticals, where people often do not understand what they are doing and why they are doing it, or where they are held back more by fear than by inspiration, and so as a leader you must find the right balance.
This can be difficult, because as a leader, you often have to go where there are no roads, only directions, and you have to sell the prospect of stability to your people, while at the same time you are completely deprived of this “stability” and it can be an internal hell. You don’t really know whether your innovation will work, whether you will be able to assemble a product from all the numerous and constantly moving pieces of the puzzle, whether you will be let down, whether you will be understood correctly, or whether the market, partners, and regulators will accept it. And so, your idea and your team goes nowhere without trust and mutual understanding between highly intelligent, creative, and independent people – not an easy feat to attain.
The greatest value is created where a complex product makes the user experience very simple, where the consumer can experience the “magic” of your project while all the complexity remains “under the hood.” To create innovative products, you need to have a high tolerance for risk, you need to constantly rise and fall, you need to walk through numerous “Valleys of Death” as many projects turn out to be much longer than initially anticipated, and you may lose shareholder money for years with a completely unobvious effect. Even the most composed visionaries among the current leaders in capitalism often had to carry out their projects on sheer faith and the team’s buy-in on what they were doing.
Skepticism is a most natural emotion in innovative new businesses and you can only defeat negative public sentiment with the faith of a large, well-motivated team of grounded intelligent people. Otherwise, it’s not worth trying. The way of innovation is always uncomfortable, risky, and yet, very interesting. If you want to live a quiet, stable, life don’t innovate. Undertake a business that is simple, understandable, and if you can, try and achieve some sort of exclusivity in it through good business methods. In this scenario you need to get comfortable with the idea that nothing lasts forever and that one day you will eventually lose to your competitors and innovators. Nevertheless, with a little luck you might make a career in this, but not much more.