The great debate about the way to run a business

Short quiz: Choose the smartest way to run your business:

1. “Founder mode”
2. “Manager mode”.

Watch sparks fly when you ask the above question in a hotbed of entrepreneurship like Silicon Valley. This is what happened when Brian Chesky and Paul Graham, co-founders of Airbnb and Y Combinator respectively, gave “founder mode” the thumbs up while ruthlessly destroying “manager mode.”

At a recent Y Combinator event, Chesky said Airbnb’s worst mistakes were when he stepped away from day-to-day management and delegated it to others. He believed that mistakes made by managers were “ten times” worse – in terms of cost and time – than mistakes made by founders. After thinking about it, Graham wrote an essay in September that also made the case for founders. Managers are experts at “management” (hiding problems, lying to their superiors), Graham said, while business schools fail to teach leadership in “founder mode.”

Starting from tech pillars like Chesky and Graham, it’s an epic defeat against managers and their cohorts like strategy consultants, MBA programs and financiers who have never founded or run a company themselves. Founder or manager mode? It’s a battle that may never be won. There are success stories for both types of leadership. Fans of the founder cheered Apple’s late Steve Jobs, imperious but effective. Today’s generation includes Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, founders who do their best work in the tireless pursuit of facts and details – Huang has 55 direct reports – and worst as delegates.

Certainly Silicon Valley’s first major company, Hewlett-Packard, was more important to the world when its founders, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, ran it. Intel is far weaker today than it was when co-founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, as well as former CEO Andrew Grove, who accompanied the company from its inception, were in charge. Note that founder Morris Chang still has influence over his great creation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., better known as TSMC.

Certainly, incubator companies make for better stories. Founders are original, ambitious, quirky, prone to working 100-hour weeks, driving fast cars and shooting wildly. But life with colorful founders isn’t always so much fun. With every successful company, more founder-led companies sink into a chaos of personality cult, nepotism, bizarre detours, unproductive drama and chaos.

They may be comparatively boring, but managerial leaders are not easily fired. They can also proudly point to their success stories. Apple’s Tim Cook avoids celebrities, but is this column’s choice for the world’s best operations manager.

Microsoft’s quietly charismatic CEO Satya Nadella managed to revitalize his company after the Gates-Ballmer era faltered. The most underrated tech CEO in the world is probably AMD’s Lisa Su. For half a century, Intel was always the leader and AMD followed suit. Su and her team flipped that script. (Irony alert: Su is Jensen Huang’s cousin.)

We could end the debate here – founder vs. manager – and call it a draw, except for another leadership mode that belongs in this discussion. It is a “family mode” that dominates every business analysis in Asia, India and the Middle East. Its relative absence in Europe and North America

Larger companies are a conundrum that requires more attention.

Why are large multi-generational companies less common in Europe and North America? Inheritance tax? Pressure to have external committees? Loss of privacy due to excessive financial disclosure laws? Generational laziness? Perhaps the most interesting fact about Chesky and

Graham’s founder-manager dichotomy is the dog that doesn’t bark, the invisible alternative. That would be the role of family businesses.

As ASEAN and India grow faster than the global economy, the strengths of family businesses in these countries will become more important. Now let’s discuss the benefits three Personalities – founders, managers and family – with fresh facts and enthusiasm.