This TIME article on JetBlue and its new CEO makes a point that doesn’t get made often enough. The founder, David Neeleman, whose started no fewer than three airlines, is stepping down after some well-publicized delay fiascoes last winter.
…the board believed it was time to get the company in the hands of a first-class operations guy, Dave Barger, the COO. Barger has proven ops chops, having helped turn Continental around. (Although he certainly has to take some blame for February, too.) In some ways, dumping Neeleman isn’t a surprising move. He’s a great entrepreneur, but perhaps one of those types who is much better at innovating than operating. The skill sets are vastly different, and many entrepreneurs get bored by running a company and tend to step aside and move onto the next business once the newbie gets on its feet.
You see this all the time in tech companies. For all their vaunted geek cred, the real brilliant move the Google guys made was handing the whole thing off to an experienced CEO, Eric Schmidt, when it became clear that the thing was getting too big for them. In most tech companies — Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Real — the CEO/svengali tends to stay on as long as possible, to often mixed results.
I’ve seen it in a fair share of the nonprofits I’ve worked for as well. Founder’s syndrome.
And how. Too many founders lack an exit strategy. There’s no vision for “and now what?”, so they hang on waaay too long. Rob Glaser, Jeff Bezos, Susan Trapnell … the list goes on and on.