Leadership

If you have lost two or three good number twos in a row, I suspect you have been telling yourself a particular story about why, and the story has probably involved the specific personalities of the people who left, the specific timing of their departures, the specific competing offers they received, or the specific stage of the business that happened to coincide with their decisions, and the story has probably been composed from a reasonable combination of facts that are indi

BEFORE YOU READ THE STAGES Every founder eventually reaches a point at which the people who built the business with them are no longer the people who can build it forward. The recognition usually arrives later than it should, and the conversation that follows is the most difficult conversation in any founder's career, which is why most founders delay it until the cost of the delay has become considerably larger than the cost of the conversation. The diagram below maps the thr