Why I Wrote Outbound Air –

Before I tell you why, here is what I see. An organization bands together to accomplish something noble. In the beginning, everyone is organized around that noble idea. It is all about that noble product or service. Find a customer to buy it. Simple. So simple that most startups go out of business in the first five years.

Yet some survive. Those that did not die, make enough sales to prove market potential. I said market potential, not market success. In fact, those initial sales did not have to be profitable sales, because this startup put all its expenses on a line of credit or a credit card, whatever it took to emerge from this infant stage.

This noble product or service, this entrepreneurial idea was in some cases a hobby. In some cases, it should have stayed a hobby. But, the entrepreneur cannot help this feeling, this cause, to bring this idea to market. All odds are stacked, yet if enough early adopters buy enough product or service, create enough market demand, the organization just might survive to the next level.

If there is enough market demand to outstrip the organization’s capacity to produce (it is all about production), then the organization has the potential to grow. To grow requires change. To produce more volume requires more resources, more people. Headcount increases along with chaos. Ichak Adizes calls this Go-Go.

In the beginning, everyone did a little bit of everything, that was all that was required. With more headcount, that strategy, everyone doing everything, creates organizational noise and friction. To reduce the noise, individual roles are created with defined accountability and authority. This transition signals the first emergence of structure.

This is the beginning of WHY I wrote Outbound Air. Tomorrow I will write about what comes after Go-Go.