Scaling up your business: why human interaction still matters despite ChatGPT

Author: Joe Haslam ,Executive Director of the Owners Scale-up Program at IE Business School. More information is available here.

Nothing that I speak about resonates as much as when I speak about triggers. Simplifying enormously the work of Dr. B.J. Fogg, who founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, most people have the ability and motivation to be more successful. The difference between those who do and those who don’t is often a trigger, defined as an event or series of events that changes your rate of progress from gradual to supercharged.

Madjid, one of Zinedine Zidane’s brothers, leads a normal life in Marseille where he works as a maintenance agent at a swimming pool. With the same parents, why was it not him who scored twice in the 1998 FIFA World Cup final? The story goes around Dublin that Pádraig Harrington’s brother was a much better golfer than he was. Yet he does not come down to breakfast and see the trophies from three Majors. Ever wondered why that is?

PRISON BREAKS

Continuing the “odd obsessions” theme, I’ve always been interested in prison breaks. How the Anglin brothers bust out of Alcatraz in 1962, how Tim Jenkin slipped out of Pretoria Maximum Security Prison in 1979, and more recently, how Carlos Ghosn got out of Japan. What often determines success in a prison break is not how to get out of your cell, or what to do once you’re on the outside, but what’s in between. You can never know for sure if there’s something in between that will prevent you from breaking free. It’s usually common knowledge among the people who work in the prison, but it’s knowledge that you don’t have.

The striking feature of Silicon Valley, where I lived for a while, is its ordinariness. Newspapers here in Spain speak of unicorn founders as the “anointed ones,” when the truth is that they have as much difficulty understanding the menu in Taco Bell as you and I do. What catapults them to “three comma” status in their net worth is the environment of Silicon Valley itself. Research backs this up. The single reason that more people do not become entrepreneurs is that it never occurs to them to do so.

So what we’re all looking for in our lives are triggers. Whether it’s losing weight or asking for a promotion, the issue is not the ambition or the motivation; it’s the lack of a trigger event. My father liked to quote Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat.”

Trigger moments were very much what we had in mind when we designed the Owners Scale-up Program, now in its tenth edition. We wanted to set up a program where there would be a before, and there would be an after. One where founders and CEOs go from agonizing over hiring a twelfth employee to one where wealth managers are sending them brochures about boats.

Now of course, this is not going to happen to everyone who takes part in the Owners Scale-up Program, but it has happened to some. What will happen to every person who does take the program is that they will spend time with people just like themselves. Which is something that most founders and CEOs do not do enough. I remember a talk given by IE University alum and co-founder & CEO of Busuu, Bernhard Niesner, at our Global Alumni Weekend in 2022. He was in no doubt how he went from letting people go to selling for $436m.

Once a month, he met with other founders in London. They would discuss the challenges facing them and how to unblock them. Your friends, your family, your children, your neighbors know really nothing about what you do and are doing. In some cases, they are even downright hostile. Entrepreneurship is not some shame that you should have to hide away. No; according to Schramm’s Law the number of startups that grow is the single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth.

The reason why the average age of a successful startup founder is 45 is that experience matters. To quote Westheimer’s Discovery “A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.” If you are trying to sign a lease on an office in Germany, for example, not speaking to someone who has signed one is not just unfortunate, it’s negligent. Similarly, if you’re agonizing over ripping out your IT stack and rebuilding from zero, what could be better than to speak with someone who just has: (“We ripped out ours, six months ago. Best thing we ever did. We can deploy now in weeks, not months.”)

The conversations I have with founders & CEOs considering the Owners Scale-up Program are often about the sessions. “Why are there sessions on family business?” My answer: “You do know that 90% of businesses are family businesses?” Or they ask, “Why do you have sessions on social innovation?” Well, “You do know that the principles Apple used to build their community all come from social innovation?” When Diego del Alcázar set up IE Business School 50 years ago, his idea was of a business school “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.” When the Owners Scale-up Program was set up, the idea was the same. The Owners Scale-up Program is the program that I wanted as a founder looking to scale.

ChatGPT had caused an avalanche of interest in Artificial intelligence (AI). Emails such as, “Are we covering ChatGPT? I think we should” are circulating within every business school. There is nothing wrong with this question, as courses need to be relevant above all. But large learning models that are the basis of ChatGPT have, as their root, the wisdom of crowds. And crowds are not entrepreneurs. It may change in the future, but for the moment anyway, scaling your business is more about one-to-one conversations with other entrepreneurs than mastering large language models. To learn the value of these conversations, come and join us on the Owners Scale-up Program.

Professor Joe Haslam is Executive Director of the Owners Scale-up Program at IE Business School. More information is available here.

LINKS

The “idea” of being an entrepreneur

Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45