Charlie Songhurst

But there's no need for that.

It can just be coached in.

And I think a lot of it is you get this very strong transition.

When you're a very small startup, most of the people you're employing just come in and do their job and go home.

And the drawback of that is you tend to end up having to do tight management, a lot of micromanagement.

And the beauty of it is you tend to get a very low level of politics within the organization.

Then you get this transition to where you're hiring people that are sort of execs, would be the sort of headhunter's description, VPs, senior people.

And the beauty of these more senior people is you can give them much more complex tasks

Build me a product division doing this.

Go open European markets for me.

And the drawback is it, anyone capable of those complex conceptual abstractions necessary to do that tends also to be capable of politics.

And because the world is not composed of saints, as an organization scales, the level of internecine politics increases exponentially.

Someone once said to me, the difference between a great company is one where the execs spend only 25% of their time playing politics and a bad one is where they spend 50% of their time

And that delta is the entire Gaussian bell curve from the best Fortune 500 company to the worst.

And I think one of the things that really matters as a founder is acting as a dampener on politics.

So reducing internecine warfare, reducing the tendency for marketing to try and take control of the sales funnel.

Reducing tendency for the head of sales to want to take over sort of inbound marketing.

Just trying to stop the CFO controlling spending so tightly that you don't get positive return on capital investments by sales.

Trying to stop sales getting so much control over spending that your margins go out of control.

All those boundary conditions between.