Zaher El Boustani

The founder’s syndrome is considered a management weakness and leadership disorder affecting every entrepreneur envisioning and planning a long-term journey for his/her established business. The challenge, with expanding companies, is that the bigger they become, the more re-organization they require through re-design, processes re-engineering, restructuring, reforming corporate governance structure and more innovation plans and strategies they would need to withhold the complexities and uncertainties of their external environments they are exposed to. Therefore, re-organizing growing businesses can become very difficult if the decision-making process remains caught at the upper level of hierarchy. The major risk factor in a business-growing journey is to be confronted with the founder’s syndrome.
A growing company led by an entrepreneur suffering from the founder’s syndrome who is afraid to let go and resist organizational re-alignment, development of strategies and introduction of advanced management systems, can never survive the complex external environmental challenges due to the excessive lack of innovation. Business innovation in complex and uncertain environments requires innovative strategy setting which, if applied, should be complemented by a re-organizational structure and design compatible with the roadmap of strategy innovation. In fact, to support and stand for innovation, the business corporate leadership culture should not be contaminated with the effect of founder’s syndrome. On the contrary, the founder should have enough creativity and empowerment skills to accept the compromise of power and control with more open communication and information sharing combined with lean organizational design, to facilitate and encourage innovation for an extended long term organizational survival.