It is endlessly fascinating to analyze different companies and look at how different cultures lead to different business results. It is also interesting to see how strategies that work in one period of a company then fail to work at other periods. No where do you see these issues better than when you watch startups grow. One can draw a lot of parallels between how people grow up and how companies mature.

Although companies are the result of combining thousands of people together into a single aggregate personality, all companies do have their own personality. And like children, they can start off with a lot of potential but fail to mature in certain areas so that they become unbalanced or immature. Over time those problems become more and more obvious and damaging. This phenomenon is most visible when looking at startups that are still run by their founders.

Founders are the guys with the vision and the grit to start a company but they rarely have the wisdom and maturity to take their companies to the next level. But they also have the passion and fire that keeps them from getting fired or from quitting or from accepting people that disagree with them. While these founder-led companies can be profitable, they are often not very nice places to work, unless you like being screamed at, have things thrown at you in meetings or getting fired for questioning the sacred cows.

Apple fired Steve Jobs and he presumably did some growing up in the interim. The Google boys hired an experienced executive right from the start. Yahoo continues to flounder while the Microsoft duo continued to hang in there. Gates has finally stepped away but Balmer, like Ellison, seems to have no desire to move on and let someone else step in.

For several years now, I have really enjoyed reading MicrosoftExtremeMakeover for his insights into Microsoft. I was very sorry to read that he is quitting because there is still obviously a lot of room for improvement which is unlikely to happen without voices for cultural change.