“In business school parlance, it’s known as the ‘founders’ dilemma.’ Inventors and entrepreneurs with a great idea start a business partnership in hopes of building and running a wildly profitable company. After all, who better to bring a product or service to market, and to lead others in that effort, than its creators?” Christina Pazzanese reports for Harvard Gazette. “More often than not, the answer is: someone else.”
“Historically, few business founders have thrived in the role of CEO. Nearly 80 percent of founders are forced out before a company fully hits its stride and goes public, according to a 2008 analysis by Noam Wasserman, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School (HBS),” Pazzanese reports. “One of the most famous and dramatic examples of this timeless power struggle took place at Apple. During its early years, flush with the success of the Apple II computer, co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs clashed over the company’s direction. Wozniak dialed back his involvement with Apple in the wake of head injuries he suffered in a 1981 plane crash, and shortly after that Jobs — by then chairman and the company’s public face — battled with the board of directors, who fired him in 1985.”
“That juicy storyline, which became widely known from the best-selling 2011 biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson ’74, was the basis for ‘Apple’s Core,’ Wasserman’s popular and influential HBS case, and one that has been taught at business schools around the world since it was first published in 2008,” Pazzanese reports. “Now, ‘Apple’s Core’ has been freshly recast for today’s image-centric student as a Japanese manga-style graphic novel [US$6.95, .pdf], one of only four such cases published by Harvard Business Review Press.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]