Julia Dhar

And then there's something really unusual about founders or very senior leaders that they love to change.

And the thing that we discovered was, indeed, founders and very senior executives, generally speaking, do like to change.

If you ask them about any type of change, about 70% of them say, well, I feel positive or very positive about that.

About 45% of employees, individual contributors, line managers in a large organization feel the same.

So there's clearly some amount of distance between a senior leader, a founder, and everybody else in an organization in terms of how much energy and appetite.

they have to change.

And I think that change distance is actually the danger zone.

And it doesn't really matter whether it is a founder-led company or you are on your second or third or 10th post-founder CEO.

It is, were we able to appreciate that that change distance existed?

You don't have to accept it as a founder.

You can continue to raise people's expectations and increase their capacity for change.

But you have to agree that it exists and continue to find productive ways to close in.

Because otherwise, then we do hear and there are plenty of stories out there of situations where the vision of the founder and the capacity of the company to execute everything

ran away from one another.

And so what should have been a kind of extraordinary story of unlocked growth and potential ended up being disappointing.

especially in organizations that have really large workforces.

So you might have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees.

When listening, for example, to the quarterly earnings calls or annual general meetings,

Do company executives, leaders of the board, speak about employees of the company with the same interest, compassion, curiosity, specificity that we talk about the customers at that same company?

We know so much.