Shadows of Material Self on Leadership

If business provides great opportunities for individuals to aspire to a higher sense of self, then there are also vast shadows cast by our material self on the field of business leadership. I learned painfully through my first start-up that these shadows originated in my own insecurities and those of others on the leadership team, especially during start-up initiation. To understand these shadows, you should understand the business context of this start-up.

The turn of the millennium was the time when the dot-com bubble was nearly at its peak. Start-ups that pursued exciting new technologies were receiving extraordinary valuations, even when they had no real customer base and showed no discernible path to profitability. It was in this context that I had just left academia and was exploring the kind of company I wanted to start. I was naturally drawn to Internet technologies, given the excitement around them among investors and the general public.

But there was an even deeper reason behind it. The capabilities the early investors and I visualized were advanced Internet-based services for technology professionals in their work. These services would be provided through some exciting new Web-based platforms that comprised data repositories, analytical applications, and software road maps that were ahead of their time. It was indeed exciting stuff! We felt very confident that we could pull this off.

But now as I consider these early years, I realize that we had propped our ladder against the wrong wall. It was not just because the whole dot-com market collapsed within a year of the start-up’s founding. Nor was it because the particular services we initially proposed were not very valuable to technology professionals. Rather, it was mainly because the market niche in which we chose to operate did not suit our capabilities. It reflected our insecurities rather than played to our strengths.

My team and I were trying to create sophisticated new technology- based solutions, even though our real strengths were in business solutions. While management was my real interest and strength, I had nurtured a subconscious feeling that technology was much more exciting and real and therefore had to be cultivated, even if I did not find it very appealing.

Naturally, this allure of technology runs deep and wide in Silicon Valley. As a result, many start-ups and leadership teams gravitate immediately to creating exciting new technologies. Many do so because technology is their real strength. But many others venture into this area because it represents an unstated weakness that they wish to overcome. These insecurities often sweep them up in the glamour of technology, while they would have been better off creating business offerings that matched their core strengths.

Start-up experience confirms the truth in positive psychology’s core finding that success comes from being grounded in your strengths rather than in trying to overcome your weaknesses. Business leadership develops its strengths through sustained exposure to the customer’s world that it comes to understand well.

The absence of such expertise in customer domains leaves business leadership with a lack of understanding of customer problems and solutions. It then does not have a deep and clear awareness of the value that it brings to customers in their domain. Without this clear sense of customer value and knowledge, business leadership has a hard time staying still and developing a persistent vision.

It was not that we were doing things that we felt were incorrect— far from it. In the absence of our own grounding, we had tacitly absorbed the values, beliefs, and expectations of the investors. We were treating them as customers who knew what needed to be done, while we should have been staking out our own truths with regard to customers and technology. We were not alone since many start-ups fall into this trap of mistaking investors for customers.

In effect, the actions that we undertook to secure our vision were really doing the opposite. They were creating a self-perpetuating cycle that merely confirmed the paper visions we had created instead of the deep learning that comes from being focused on real customers and staying within the limits of our technological competence. As business leaders, we were anchored in a false sense of self, a self that catered to our insecurities and expectations of what others wanted of us, rather than the self that was anchored in our own strengths and expertise.

It was at this direct and personal level that I learned one of my biggest lessons about business leadership: the corporation was not just the source of my aspirations for a higher sense of individual self but also the field on which my current self cast deep shadows.