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Sounds like the name for a chronic disease. In the startup world, it is.
I found this interesting definition of Founderitis on Wikipedia:
“The term “founderitis” or “founder’s syndrome” refers to the unhealthy condition that afflicts many companies whose founders maintain a stranglehold on organizational leadership. While many companies owe their success — and in fact their very existence — to their founders, those same individuals can create chaos that ultimately leads to the organization’s collapse. The challenge to founding CEOs and boards of directors is to take steps to change conflict and chaos into opportunities for growth.”
I have personally experience this running my own business. I have found some ways to avoid it:
- Respect the need for planning activities, staff meetings, and administrative policies;
- Realize that as the company grows circumstances may dictate new approaches;
- Institute new systems with approval of your board;
- Seek and accept input from others in making decisions;
- Delegate, Delegate, Delegate
Don’t worry if you can’t over come this there is a simple solution. The route many take is to get your board to hire a professional CEO and take a long vacation.
So how many of you have had problems with founderitis? What is your story? Have a great example to share? Let the comments be the conversation.
Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship
1829 days ago
[...] I was getting back into the swing yesterday I came across the great blog post by Steve at Startup Spark about Founderitis. I read the symptoms and self-diagnosed that I had a [...]
1834 days ago
[...] the new blogger over at StartUpSpark.com – Steve’s got some great information and tips for business owners suffering from ‘founderitis’ – the inability to let your business grow larger than your own micro-management tendencies. [...]
Steve,
Great article. You’ve been dugg:
http://digg.com/business_finance/5_Ways_to_Avoid_Founderitis
Damn that founderitis! I’m trying to not get emotionally attached to any of my projects. It’s hard.
1835 days ago
[...] Avoid Founderitis(startupspark) “The term “founderitis” or “founder’s syndrome” refers to the unhealthy condition that afflicts many companies whose founders maintain a stranglehold on organizational leadership. [...]
Thanks. It is just a good to be aware of the signs so you avoid it all together!
This is a great post Steve! The odd thing is that we haven’t really experienced anything like this at OnCard Marketing. My co-founder and I are actually very comfortable delegating many tasks to outside vendors and part-time employees. It might just be the human nature of each entrepreneur, and founder-itis is a common characteristic. I think that many entrepreneurs, like us at OnCard Marketing, who come from the corporate world where administrative tasks and delegating are commonplace, find themselves following these principals as a founder of their start-up. Maybe the truth is that we’re just still so small that founder-itis hasn’t kicked in yet or is just not visible at this point. I’ll keep you posted!