This is a fantastic list and I strongly resonate as the leader of a rapidly growing organisation with some of the challenges as fixes that you have shared.
One half-baked thought that I have is that often the skills that make individuals great at entrepreneurship are orthogonal to the skills that may make someone good at building the operational backbone of an organisation. For examples—entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with rapid and often ad hoc decision making, failing fast, comfort with risk and uncertainties, and generally a cowboy / cowgirl mindset. However, in order to build long-term, sustainable operational structures for growing organisations one needs systematic thinking, SOPs and organised policies, risk aversion or at least a risk mitigation mindset, certaintiy and more of a ‘city-planner’ mindset.
Therefore, one thing that I have observed is that it can often be helpful for organisations to explicitly recognise when they are shifting from R&D / pilot mode to growth / scaling mode and to invest early in operational capacity.
This is a fantastic list and I strongly resonate as the leader of a rapidly growing organisation with some of the challenges as fixes that you have shared.
One half-baked thought that I have is that often the skills that make individuals great at entrepreneurship are orthogonal to the skills that may make someone good at building the operational backbone of an organisation. For examples—entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with rapid and often ad hoc decision making, failing fast, comfort with risk and uncertainties, and generally a cowboy / cowgirl mindset. However, in order to build long-term, sustainable operational structures for growing organisations one needs systematic thinking, SOPs and organised policies, risk aversion or at least a risk mitigation mindset, certaintiy and more of a ‘city-planner’ mindset.
Therefore, one thing that I have observed is that it can often be helpful for organisations to explicitly recognise when they are shifting from R&D / pilot mode to growth / scaling mode and to invest early in operational capacity.