Overcoming the adolescent stage of business is a necessary part of 'lifes journey' for both the enterprise and it's founder.
Maturing the adolescent company is rarely comfortable or easy. As Ichak Adizes has observed, "People organisations like organic systems, express predictable patterns of behaviour as they move through their own lifecycle. At each stage, the behavioural patterns manifest themselves as a certain struggle, where certain transitional problems must be overcome."
For business owners it requires a lot of emotional maturity to accept that he or she has to adopt a different; almost contradictory approach to move forward. Why is this so? Because intuitive control has to give way to delegated and systematised control. And accepting this is never easy for a reactive hand's-on business owner. It's a phase where talented and autonomous entrepreneurs may find their efforts fall short of the most generous 'emotional intelligence' test.
"And so?"
Simply put; their is a lot of emotional ballast to offload. The act of instituting systems and leveraging technology is a logical decision. But being a owner who can willingly subordinate themselves to such systems rests much more in the emotional than the logical domain. This phase in the business owners life may well require character development of a more personal nature than they are expecting or accustomed to. None-the-less, it is true to say that the growth and maturity of the enterprise, will never exceed the personal growth of the founder. If these hurdles are not managed well the enterprise will beat a retreat. To quote Peter Senge on 'change and learning', "it is critical to dispel the illusion held by many leaders that they can lead organisational change without being ready to change themselves."
Although the linkage could be considered somewhat oblique, two companies which offer technologies, which can be leveraged in support of such maturity in a small to medium sized business are Netsuite and Salesforce. They are very much growing and maturing in their own right, even as they seek to offer their client company's the same 'rites of passage'. The following ZDNET article of Dan Farber attests to this tussle as they 'face-off' in the newly contested SaaS technology domain.
NetSuite launches SuiteFlex to build out verticals by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- It’s been interesting to watch NetSuite and salesforce.com grow up over the last few years. The chief executives at the two companies, Zach Nelson and Marc Benioff, share a common heritage of cutting their teeth at Oracle, but have taken different approaches to spreading the SaaS, multitenancy gospel. Salesforce.com has is roots in CRM [...]
SaaS or 'software as a service' is a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to the client.
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