A Leader

Randy Haykin: The Making of an Entrepreneur.” 

“The transition went fairly smoothly because I had an amazing first and second year in business. In most start-ups, it takes several years to grow, make money, and find your niche. In my first year at Interactive Minds, I tripled my salary and found myself doing amazing projects with total choice and control over what I was doing.”

“The down-side, after the first year, is that I was beginning to feel lonely heading up a small start-up on my own. There were also elements of the business that I didn't enjoy -- bookkeeping, managing people's problems, getting customers to pay their bills, and to a certain extent the constant business development. (When you run your own consulting business, you are in perpetual business development mode.) The biggest challenge of the entrepreneurial situation was balancing family and work.”

“of course partners bring on a whole new set of frustrations—for example, how much autonomy was I willing to sacrifice in return for help from Carl in running the business? I’ll often go home at night (and I’ve actually told Carl this) really disappointed because I can’t make a simple call anymore. Instead I’ve got to convince Carl and sometimes we can’t see eye to eye. But that’s the whole point. I wanted to bring on a partner so we’d have a balanced perspective. For all I know, Carl may be keeping me out of all kinds of trouble.”

“To me, a leader is someone who sets the creative direction for a concept and can then harness the human resources to turn that concept into a reality: a product, a market, or a company. In essence, a leader is someone who creates something from nothing. First, they focus on a concept, and then they have to persuade people to join around that concept. I believe leadership evolves as you go through different stages in the life-cycle of the company. In the early stages, leadership has more to do with the creation of an exciting idea, for example trying to plug a hole in a market that hasn't been plugged. It is really an individual or small group effort at the beginning. Then, as the company evolves, I think it becomes more of a management challenge: you have to know enough about what the company needs to grow in order to put great people in the right positions. Eventually, you should be able to step back as the leader, and let other people's own ideas shape the business.”

“Another key element of leadership is identifying the future before it's happened. A good leader has more than “vision”—a good leader sees an end point, and then somehow garners sufficient resources around him or herself to work towards that end. What they see may be five years out, but they say, “I've got this vision, and I'm going to keep pushing and pushing until we get to that point.” They are always thinking ahead, trying to be two years or so ahead of the rest of the crowd. For me, that defines leadership, but it also defines how you find these opportunities. If you sit back and wait for them to come to you, then every other smart person who's there with you has figured out the same thing. So you have to try to take a guess at where things are going, and then work backwards from that point.”