by Charles Plant | Mar 23, 2016 | Entrepreneurship
As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that logic and facts don’t matter. This is tremendously upsetting as I’ve grown up to favour the logical over the emotional. In fact I actually get turned on by facts. (Yes, how nerd-like can one be?)
The death of Rob Ford and the ascendancy of Donald Trump (Drompf?) brought this to the fore. Here are two politicians whose brazen manipulation and ignorance of facts didn’t hurt them at all in political battles. What they understand is that all that matters is emotions. And they did a great job appealing to the basest of human emotions.
I blogged about some of this this yesterday on LinkedIn which I’m experimenting with as a blogging platform. Today though I was reading an article in Harvard Business Review on the Science of Emotions which really focussed my thinking.
Because emotions are messy, hard to predict and difficult to use in marketing, this group created a standard lexicon of emotional motivators that can be used by marketers. This will allow companies to use data analytics to identify emotional motivators and use statistical modelling to determine the most profitable customer motivators.
This is all slightly upsetting to think that I am being manipulated like this all the time. But then I thought about what I buy. For some odd reason, I have an emotional attachment to Apple products because of their design. My hyper-logical son is quick to point out though that I’m buying a closed system at tremendous cost and that it doesn’t make logical sense. But I love Apple products. There’s that emotional reaction.
And I wear a lot of Patagonia clothing. Not because it’s the best manufactured outdoor wear but because I love the image they portray and how I identify with their image.
But does this mean logic and facts are dead? Maybe not dead yet but failing. If we can turn emotional appeal into a science then maybe we have merged emotion and logic in a way that will turn consumerism fully into a new wave religion.
by Charles Plant | Mar 8, 2016 | Entrepreneurship
Commentators have long criticized Canada’s inability to scale high-tech companies to world-class size. Could our habit of ousting the founder os scaling companies be the problem? According to the Centre for Digital Entrepreneurship + Economic Performance, “Canada continues to struggle to produce the type of sustainable, high-growth firms in knowledge-intensive sectors that policy-makers have identified as crucial to the country’s economic future. While the density of high-tech startups and entrepreneurs in Canada is among the world’s highest, the creation of high-growth Canadian firms continues to lag behind” (deepcentre, A Lynchpin in Canada’s Economic Future: Accelerating Growth and Innovation with World-Class Business Acceleration Ecosystem, 2015).
Although Canada has created an ecosystem that produces many startups, few of these companies grow to become Unicorns. These are defined as privately held companies with valuations in excess of one billion dollars. Certainly, we have had world-leading companies such as Blackberry and Mitel, and more recently Unicorns such as HootSuite and Kik Interactive. But most of our successful startups are sold before they reach world-class size. Overcoming this growth hurdle is crucial to positioning Canadian companies favourably in global markets.
In this study, we are looking at the professional history and experience of technology startup leaders to determine whether specific aspects of their backgrounds limit their willingness or ability to scale the company under their leadership. The analysis is guided by two questions:
- Is Canada limited by the amount of CEO talent needed to lead and grow successful technology companies?
- Do founders make good CEOs, or are they outperformed by professional CEOs?
The second question is based on anecdotal evidence; some of the most successful technology companies in history have been led by their founders well after the companies reached their world-class status. This includes Steve Jobs and Apple, Bill Gates and Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google, and Ed Oates and Larry Ellison from Oracle . Many of these companies were founded by young people—some were even without undergraduate degrees—who became successful CEOs of game-changing businesses. We also looked at the issue of founder replacement and compared worldwide practices with those in Canada.
Our findings, while limited in scope by the nature of the data available, suggest that:
- Canadian Founder CEOs are just as experienced as the Founder CEOs of Unicorns in terms of prior experience as serial entrepreneurs.
- Our Professional CEOs are more experienced than Unicorn Professional CEOs in terms of prior experience as founders and as CEOs of venture capital-backed companies.
- Founder CEOs outperform Professional CEOs in Unicorns and Canadian companies.
- While Canadians have a habit of ousting Founder CEOs and replacing them with Professional CEOs 47% of the time, Founder CEOs are only replaced 18% of the time in Unicorn companies.
Our conclusion is that Canadian founders have the right backgrounds to grow successful world-class companies and that our reluctance to scale to that level may be attributed partially to our tendency ousting Founder CEOs and replacing them with Professional CEOs.
As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that logic and facts don’t matter. This is tremendously upsetting as I’ve grown up to favour the logical over the emotional. In fact I actually get turned on by facts. (Yes, how nerd-like can one be?)