I’ve always associated the terms “administration”, “stability”, and “management” with over-sized and non-innovative companies and institutions. A small and dynamic group can generate rapid growth and pivot efficiently over night. Vigilant, measurable, and agile action trumps bureaucratic trickle-down policies of stagnation.

As pointed out in The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, however, entrepreneurship is a form of “management”. The innovation and growth that characterize a startup require a structure that can orient the momentum created by them. As counter-intuitive as it might feel for a google-generation entrepreneur, management can provide that structure.

As a leader in the organization that I co-founded, I figured out that even the people that form the institution itself need a structure within which to operate. At first, my co-founders and I naturally took on the bulk of the work needed to move forward to the next day and delegated out smaller tasks to interns. We were not concerned with long-term or even short-term goals, we were on an instant-term basis. We wanted to make things happen in the moment. We masked this behind an agile methodology, but in reality it was an excuse to create wakes of urgency in tides of uncertainty.

Now that we are about to launch a commercial product, I see how the tools that I have employed up to this point to motivate my team are losing their edge. The sense of urgency under which we operated is no longer present. We are burnt out. Since the bulk of the development is complete and we are about to ship our product out to a saturated market, my developers are feeling like their job is complete. After having been teased by extended deadlines from product development, my marketing team hardly believes that the product is ready. The energy has dissipated.

I feel that I am losing control and that I need to foster the birth of a new phase of management where our sense of urgency is fueled by short-term goals. As I take a step back from the day-to-day operation, I must take the helm of the ship. I can no longer be involved with instant-term aspects of the company and propagate my pool of energy and drive as I have done since we began. I must trust that I have lit the torches of the people around me so that they may themselves continue on to light the fires of enthusiasm throughout the organization.

---

I also see that there is an inherent belief existing in our society that effective management can only be properly executed by experienced individuals. It is because of this attitude that we have assigned age brackets to successive rungs of the corporate ladder. An ad hominem fallacy is at play here because people are born with the ability to effectively manage ideas and people. No educational nurturing can replace the fact that we are naturally born with certain strengths and weaknesses that we carry for the length of our lives. Today, society feels indebted to the aging population, crediting them with an understanding and adroitness that may or may not be merited, and placing them in managerial positions across the board as a result to “minimize” risks, when in actuality they are often the reason for stagnation and impotence. There is no doubt that an individual’s value as a manager is dependent upon his/her experience, but I believe that it is a weak dependence. An awkward leader who has ample experiences in leadership will rarely trump a born leader with sparse experience. The inclination to assume that a potential defined by a written track record is superior to an untapped potential is a fatal flaw in logic that a large majority of our society buys in to. Society’s perception of risk needs to shift to include the value of talented youth while appropriately calibrating the value of seniority.

As my organization grows, my experience grows with it. I understand that my management skills will have to evolve and adapt to the conditions that change as we progress into a larger establishment, but the reason for our success today or tomorrow will remain largely dependent upon my ability to impart disciplined energy and drive to others within our company. This ability is an inherent trait of the entrepreneur, independent of age or experience. Success lies with those who can inspire others to lead. Those who can do that are by nature entrepreneurs because they have the ability to create opportunity where none existed before.