The “Captain’s Chair” is what I call the chair of the entrepreneur which always has to be filled and which sits prominently in the middle of the office and all the business being conducted within. It comes out of the simple evolution from running a 1-man show, and then hiring on more people to do the work. It also has a lot to do with how sensitive the service is that is being released, and when customers expect services to be at the same level of professionalism that the initial founder has always displayed, it is understandably hard to let go.

It is also a trap that is being written about in plenty of business “self-help” books and is, in my opinion, best solved through designing processes to be as failure-free and as simple as possible. In other words, like the preparation of a McDonalds hamburger, which is a scientifically designed factory process.

One public example of the captain’s chair phenomenon is Micheal Arrington’s Techcrunch, which has, until recently, always been run out of his own apartment, and even today he is (I believe) the no. 1 editor and certainly the no. 1 PR guy. In no other media publication of that size (in terms of readership numbers, not company size) does the founder take such a prominent and involved position and, physically and mentally, I’m sure, it is taking its toll on Arrington. Similarly, I know several small companies, where this is a problem, with similar consequences on the founder.

This is not to say that doing the opposite is necessarily a good thing. As perhaps the case of Starbucks showed, which recently had to ask its original founder, Howard Schultz, to return to the captain’s chair, sometimes an organisation can forget the original values it was based on and do some silly things. In Schultz’s case, I have actually always blamed its problems on his book, which was essentially a franchise manual for anyone who wanted to set up a coffee-shop, and which might have also inspired McDonalds to basically become an affordable Starbucks alternative for the masses. A story for another day, but I think the current Starbucks model is doomed and Schultz will have to redesign the company’s business model from scratch.

There is certainly a careful balance that needs to be maintained when designing a company to both expand a business’s reach, without losing the heart of the business. Together with the simple process of “preparing a burger,” you need to instil the values that also lead to the “smile” that accompanies the sale of the burger and leads to a satisfied customer (and his return-visit).

Designing companies must thus, in my opinion, be a rich process, involving the founder(s)’s, the employees’, and customers’ input, finally leading from the single business to the chain of businesses serving all customers equally or superiorly well.

Vincent

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