A bad game?

My current internal debate: Are startups a bad game to play?

In the narrow sense, "startups" are companies seeking hyper-growth to rapid exit. I think this creates a certain kind of leadership game which is sub-optimal.

It burns through leaders, reducing the typical term to < 2 years. This is bad. When leaders are burning out, it seeds a culture of burnout. Short tenures also leave little room for responsible stewardship.

This in term enables founder CEOs to behave like tyrants, which leads to all kinds of corporate stupidity. If the senior team are not sticking around long enough to develop deep and trusting relationships, they cannot engage in productive conflict. Yes, we need visionary CEOs, and to be a visionary you often need some 'tyrant' energy - but you also need to temper that with some maturity. That maturity does not come when you are treated like Henry VIII - "behead your wife, sire? Why of course!"

The alternative is to build companies that are sustainable engines of value for the long term, and that have a deep commitment to organisational excellence as a way of delivering this. I think to get that kind of high performance culture, you need to be playing a different game.

And then, on the opposing side... we are facing some urgent problems. If you have a ground-breaking clean tech product, it would be highly beneficial if you scaled at light speed...