Will I love The Founder's Mentality?

Zook and Allen are two of the most insightful people I know. I’ve taught their “stuff’ to my students for many years. Entrepreneurship is a journey that’s not for the faint of heart, for there are the inevitable gale-force winds that threaten to blow you off course, as this book so clearly demonstrates.

If every founder would imbue his or her company with the founder’s mentality and follow Zook’s and Allen’s advice about how to keep it in place, we’d have far more long-run successes than today’s daunting failure statistics so sadly display. 

This is really a recommendation for those working in the non-profit space as staffers, board members, or key philanthropic funders.

What Zook and Allen lay out here really resonated with my own experience founding and scaling non-profits, and with what I see from those founding and scaling for-profit companies, and it’s a excellent concise read on the pitfalls that NGOs (and companies in general) often fall into as they get larger.

I generally don’t like reading books by management consultants, being a former one myself, but this book stands out. The authors take a life-cycle view of companies, showing how the early stages, dominated by the mavericks who started the company, eventually give way to bureaucracy, creating a significant distance between the boardroom and its users.

They start the book with a central thesis, which I think is invaluable for any leader: growth creates complexity, and complexity is the silent killer of growth. This is another book I wish I had written.