GrowthMindset: #Founder

In the previous post, I shared why every individual, organisation, industry or country would do well to create a growth-system in order to support any transformation. A growth-system involves re-engineering everything, designed with a focus on growth - by creating growth-mindsets, growth-boards, growth-management, growth-journeys, growth-experiments, and growth-missions.    

In the next two posts, I unpack the growth-mindsets part of the growth-system. Specifically, looking at #Founder mindset and the #Speed as a mindset. This is guided by the observation that we - as government, parents, or individuals - are focusing too much on knowledge, skills, methodologies, and technologies. We should place an equal measure of importance on cultivating, shaping, questioning, designing, and shifting mindsets. As HH Sheikh Mohammed said: “develop a mindset, (for) a change in mindset will change behaviours and outcomes”. Give someone a tool, or a methodology, and its impact may last a few minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. However, when you help someone embrace a new mindset, its impact can last a lifetime or even generations.  

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We often talk about the ‘founding’ fathers of our respective countries, but it is important to establish what this means. In the UAE context, where others saw desert, the ‘founding fathers’ saw opportunity; where others sowed divisions, the ‘founding’ fathers sowed vision. 

In this unprecedented time of uncertainty, reinvention, and emergency, the question I ask is how do we infuse this #Founder mindset in ourselves:, every area of government, every organisation, and every citizen. We need to go from the original 7 ‘founding’ fathers, to millions of founders: ‘founding’ mothers, ‘founding’ employees, ‘founding’ doctors, and ‘founding’ citizens. 

Finding a way to foster this mindset at a wider level is now more important than ever, as it is currently all too easy for us individuals and our organisations to lose this founders’ mindset, resulting in  a decrease in growth, purpose and value. We have seen famous examples of founders leaving their organisations - notably Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz - in which the founder’s return has once again infused the founding spirit into the organisation.  BCG’s research revealed that the founder’s mindset is often linked to a disproportionately large contribution to growth and profitability of a company’s stock price. 

In the remainder of this post, I’d like to draw attention to the different ingredients which make up a founder-mindset. They can range from having a sense of insurgency of fighting incumbents, to a frontline obsession. For the sake of brevity, and to unpack the less known frames, I will explore three additional ingredients which include reverse-engineering a vision, zero-thinking, and democratising sense of ownership.

Ingredient 1: Reverse engineering a vision

Founders of any new idea, innovation, or organisation, see and think of the world in a different way. 

Whilst the CEO may spend more of his or her time on the product,  business model, or strategy, the founder gives themself the ownership of a vision, of defining, shaping and iterating a vision of creating a better future, today. Founders eat, sleep, and breathe this vision. They often work backwards, reverse-engineering from their vision to what is needed today in order to move forwards.

The ‘forward-engineering’ mindset is the traditional approach. It’s slow and linear. It uses current limits and constraints, historical mental models, business cases, and existing cash flows as a benchmark for when scaling should happen.

By contrast, the ‘reverse-engineering’ thinking is based on future value and cash flows. The late Sheikh Rashid, one of the founders of the UAE, exhibited this #founder mindset. Consultants advised on how big the Dubai Port should be based on current operational capacity and projections of trade growth: the forward-engineering view. However, Sheikh Rashid said it should be several orders of magnitude bigger, taking the reverse-engineering viewpoint. Why? Because he wasn’t building for today; he was building for a vision of the future that he had in his mind’s eye. 

Founders don’t often make compromises on this vision. At first, the vision may be unclear, but they are constantly stress-testing their hypotheses on this vision. While they might be willing to pivot on the products, services, solutions, they will rarely pivot on their vision. 

Ingredient 2: Zero-thinking

Founders embrace the $0 frame of thinking, more than the $5. 

To paraphrase and summarise, Professor Lang gave her graduate students $5 at the beginning of the class and asked to see what they would make of it. Some would bring back $10, $50, or $500 dollars from running cake sales, car washing, or other conventional means. However, some students would return holding $2,000 or even $5,000. 

She began to unpick their plans: what was the difference between these two groups? The groups that came back with lower profits had taken the constraint as literal, and therefore put a finite limit on what they could do with it. The other group took the $0 mindset, where starting with nothing was a constraint that led them to consider far more creative options and possibilities. 

Founders are like that; they operate with the $0 thinking. 

They are not constrained by an existing system, or by ‘legacy’ thinking. They are not tied to the past behaviours of individuals or whether long-standing markets exist. They do not allow themselves to be held back by sunk costs. Successful founders understand that the problem is often a consequence of some design in the past; the solution can be found in a new design  in the future. 

They dare to ask the questions that less innovative thinkers are afraid to: what if we had to start from scratch? With no system, what would be the design? They are not constrained by others’ opinions, which are far too often just assumptions and hypotheses. 

Whilst the CEO’s role is about taking something and making it bigger, the founder's role is to create something from nothing. 

Ingredient 3: Democratise sense of ownership

The founders of billion-dollar organisations - from Richard Branson (Virgin) to Vineet Nayar (former CEO of HCL Technologies) - espouse the idea of putting employees first and customers second. The basic thinking being that if you create a sense of ownership for employees, they will, in turn, take care of your customers. Similarly, we can reference the example of Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, who was fixed on his north-star question: how do you make everyone in the government feel, think, and act like a prime minister? With this approach of democratising control, ownership, and roles, I’ve instituted a different management within the Cabinet Secretariat - self management - to help drive less of an ‘employee’ mindset, and, instead, more of  a ‘founder’ mindset.

This new management model is the hardware, giving permission for employees to exist without fixed roles. They are free to act like founders of their own roles, create groups (circles), empowered to make decisions, take ownership of new ideas, and most importantly, the ownership to let go of things that are not having an impact.  This requires a shift from the old mindsets of thinking - acting like “employees” of the Cabinet Secretariat - to the new mindsets of being, playing, and acting as the “founders”.

A second example  of the new management models that we have recently launched is Community Pulse. It gives a voice to the tensions, concerns, missed opportunities, and challenges of citizens. His High Highness, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has identified this tension. In his Spring 2019 letter, he talked about how we, as ‘founders’, need to be in the field, outside of our comfortable buildings, in order to close the gap between government and citizen.  Community Pulse’s work includes listening to weak signals, paying attention to frontline community, and providing pathways for their concerns to reach the cabinet for speedy interventions. Still, in my opinion, its purpose goes beyond this; it is to empower citizens to think, feel, engage and act as founders of the UAE.

My third and final example is the creation of Reglab. The goal of this is to support individual entrepreneurs, government regulators and corporate organisations; it is to encourage all of us to act less like guardians of the past, and more like founders of new markets. 

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In summary, I believe that we all need to act more like founders, and less like CEOs, Director Generals, and Department managers. We need to be working with less focus on positions, and more focus on our roles as founders.