Founder's Syndrome

It's been interesting over the last few weeks to watch the reaction first to rumors then to confirmations of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' poor health. For those readers unfamiliar with the Apple/Jobs back story, Jobs founded Apple with brilliant hacker Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, and was one of the first people to recognize the potential market for personal computers. In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh, in the process revolutionizing the industry. An internal power struggle a couple years later saw Jobs depart, however, only to return in the mid 1990s and basically rescue the company.

In the last 10 years, the company has returned to become one of the most powerful brands in the world, and Jobs is widely recognized as having revolutionized three industries - personal computing, music (iPod), and telecommunications (iPhone) - or four, if you count his tenure with Pixar. Jobs himself has an incredible personal brand and following.

But some have wondered, with the CEO's fingerprints and vision embedded in so many parts of the company (right down to selecting Yael Naim's "New Soul" to launch the Macbook Air last year), could it survive and thrive if and when he leaves? Now, faced with uncertain health and a 6-month leave of absence, Apple is clearly suffering from their reliance (or at least, the perception of their reliance) on their visionary leader to make the company successful. The business world is aflutter, exemplified in a ReadWriteWeb post today called the "Perils of the Rock Star CEO" today.

The nonprofit sector suffers from endemic founder's syndrome. The plight is systemic, and routed in the fact that there is still no more effective fundraising strategy than to have a charismatic visionary who does the Oprah-Conference Keynote-Book Tour junket week after week and month after month. This is not a knock on those individual leaders. Usually, they find themselves in the position they're in because they offer an important, unique, compelling view of the world (think Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core or Paul Farmer of Partners in Health). And when the mission is so important, it's the right strategy for them to focus energy on the most effective means they have to enable that mission. I've seen dozens of these would-be social change heroes who understand the danger of founder's syndrome and ward against it by investing deeply in their staff and relinquishing important elements of control even when they're technically "in charge."

But I worry about the social entrepreneurship field's tendency to latch onto the mythology of the heroic individual with extraordinary powers to change the world. I'm attracted to settings like the Social Capital Markets conference because they expand our perception of the field towards a view of a market ecosystem with individual and institutional actors who by definition rely upon one another. I'm supportive of even harsh critiques of social entrepreneurship like Michael Edwards' "Just Another Emperor?" because I think they keep our feet to the fire and make sure we don't get trapped in our own narratives.

Malcom Gladwell's new book Outliers points out just how inaccurate our Horatio Alger up-by-your-bootstraps and if-you-only-work-hard-enough point of view is, and just how dramatically our misperceptions about individual achievement impact society. To take one example, he shows how a large percentage of Silicon Valley's first generation computer innovators - Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, Bill Gates of Microsoft - were born in either 1954 or 1955 (just in time to reach adolescence as computer science was becoming a field) and had some unique environmental opportunity to learn how to program far earlier and with greater depth than their peers. For Gates it was his private high school's purchase of a computer terminal and for Joy it was a glitch in the University of Michigan system which gave him basically unlimited access to program on their new state of the art terminal.

The point is that our talent and individual capacity is largely shaped by the opportunities of the environments we happen to find ourselves in. It's worth remembering the sheer chance and serendipity involved in success.

Here's hoping that Steve makes a full and speedy recovery.