What happens once you’ve made it to the top?  Is there only one way to go?  It must be lonely up there, especially for early stage founders that build multi-million dollar businesses from ideas on a napkin.

A few thoughts on the symptoms of companies entering murky water when guided by the helm of a strong personalities.

Getting too personal. Strong personality of early stage founders can have a strong impact on the success of a company.  Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are excellent examples of using their personalities to drive their businesses from start-up to game changers.   Sometimes the personal lives of the man-in-charge can seriously jeopardize an entire business – like taking down so called ‘problem elephants’ and broadcasting to the world via your company’s blog.   Definitely not the player’s move.  Getting to personal once you think you’re on top makes easy pickings for competitors to exploit arrogance for critical weaknesses.

Difficulty in transitioning control. Some companies need their founders to leave, others bring their founders back to help get their business back on course.  It goes both ways.  Yahoo did it once with success when Jerry Yang came back, but once the company needed serious operational insight over start-up driven creativity the transition of Jerry’s exit cost the company dearly, dropping down stock prices in 2008 to unprecedented levels.

Ignoring birth defects in the business model.  A fast as a business can explode with success they can easily topple over.  I was shocked on my last visit to the US to see either closed down or lack of video rental stores.  Even more surprising is Blockbuster’s lack unwillingness to adapt to their customers needs to invest in online business channels.  With the vast resources in people, cash, retail outlets and management expertise it seem unimaginable that a company’s upper management would ignore the obvious.

It’s easy to say this from far away, the real challenge is putting this into practice.