Hello, my name is Alain Bloch. My academic and professional journey is as follows. I am the scientific Director of Master HEC Entrepreneurs, and Teacher at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers where I teach Marketing. I was an entrepreneur, I was even a recidivist. I also worked at the Tribunal of Commerce in Paris as a the President of Chamber. I help leaders who want to manage, and I am also administrator to some companies, already established, and to a start-up. The question we ask ourselves today is, what makes a good team? How to put a team together? And how young innovative companies form themselves eventually? Well, the first principle is the young innovative companies are structured around a leader who is never alone because entrepreneurship is definitively a team effort. Enterpreneurship is a long road full of obstacles, and a good team spirit is essential to the success of a project. Timons model, Jeff Timmons was a professor at Babson College which is a little Mecca of entrepreneurship in the United States. The Timons model reminds us, as this slide shows, that it is necessary to look for a balance between the sizing of the team, the sizing of the resources, and the opportunity which is the support of the innovative company. As an example, when, on site often the example of Netscape, when Netscape, the first Internet browser was created, the founding team was a team which consisted of exceptional people, who had very important responsibilities in the world of telecom and computing. And of course, when Internet Explorer, in other words the browser from Microsoft, was released into the market, the perspectives of this entrepreneurial opportunity which represented Netscape clearly decreased, and suddenly, the team found itself in a way, oversized. Therefore, one doesn't necessarily have to look to add too much talent in a start-up. It is necessary to proportion this team in relation to the size and the perspectives of the opportunity. In the same way that the resources are proportioned. During other sessions, you will learn that one can also disappear with too many resources, and not from just not having enough. A start-up can lead to malfunction, an innovative company if we have an oversized team, but of course if we have an undersized company too. Therefore, a good balance is hard to find, and the capitalist ventures who take charge to finance these innovative companies remind us that a good team, the famous dream team they are all looking for, is structured usually around five talents, what the VC often call the five mature ones. So, I am eager now to tell you of course, they are not necessarily five persons. One person can add up to two or even three of these five mature ones. So, what are these great five skills? It is necessary to have, at the head of a start-up, first and foremost, a visionary. Someone who has a true vision, not only of the surroundings of the start-up, but also of the perspectives of the development. It is necessary to have a marketer, someone who has a good command
of this marketing of high technology which is very specific. A seller, and the capitalist ventures make the distinction between these
two functions which can sometimes of course become one and only man, but which have two completely different skills. A technician, someone who, of course, is an expert, in the mentioned technological field, and generally, a back office man who is most often a financier, but who can, in some cases, also be a logistics person. One thinks about e-commerce, where the back office is as much logistical as it is financial. So of course it is possible to regroup these different elements. One thinks, for example, about Steve Jobs who was both a visionary, marketer and a technician. Therefore, once more, it is not absoutely necessary to have these five skills represented in five people, but they must be present, and the real dream team must reunite its five mature ones, its five dimensions. At the beginning it was difficult, of course, one often creates a start-up with two persons, sometimes three, and therefore at the beginning one of these skills could be missing, but these characteristics will be used as a main lead to the constitution, as time goes on the life of the company of this dream team, or investors are looking for therefore as I mentioned a leader in charge. What is the role of the leader? Well, several metaphors can be used to try and characterise the role of the leader. There is, of course, the metaphor of the conductor. Obviously, the leader, in a start-up must coordinate, sort of do everything. As the saying goes, to have head in the stars and feet in the clay, or hands in dirty oil. He must also be a military head, because of course, we go through very difficult steps in which the team leader must in a way reassure, show an example, inspire confidence. He also can, and he must often be a chef, because a bit like in a kitchen, one must be able to cope with the tension during mealtime rush, but also be able to deliver and coordinate all the talents so that they can give the right product on the market at the right time. So, this leader's role, Karl Weick, a researcher at the University of Chicago is helping us trying and understand his role in a little more theorical setting. Karl Weick explains to us, that one must manage to give a meaning in a framework of action. So, what is the meaning? Well there are two explanations for meaning, in the French language. The meaning, is not only a way, a way to its existence, give meaning to what we are doing. But also, it is a meaning relating to its history, its projects. So, this double acceptation of the term is very important. It is not only to give meaning, in other words show the way, but also to give a true significance to what is around you. It is in a way building the world vision which is going to support the action of the whole company. And the setting, well, it is of course the structure, the organisation, the rules, the roles, some elements of the culture of the company. And to use another metaphor, it is very hard to explain without a setting. One can use the metaphor of the road. A road, to show you the way, needs edges. If none are on each side of the path, a proper edge, then, the road cannot show where to go, the way. And all of those wo have walked in the desert know it. For Karl Weick it is truly the main role of the leader, to make sense and build a setting. It is of course easy to say, and a lot more difficult to achieve. And at the end, this first example that I offer to you, shows this interaction between meaning and setting that Karl Weick calls the process of structuration and which leads the actors, the team members of operating logic as sociologists as it is said. Karl Weick has insisted a lot on these interactions between the setting and the meaning. He has explained a lot to us, the setting and the meaning were reinforced at the same time in the action of the leader, but in certain cases, in what they call the cosmological sessions, in other words very complicated sessions where the whole team confronts very improbable and difficult situations. And it is often the case in start-ups, because they are confronted with a complexity, an unpredictability of things which are often very disturbing for the teams. Well in this case, sometimes, the setting and the meaning in some way confuse us, collapse simultaneously, and this creates a kind of vicious circle which was well illustrated in an article regarding the fire of Mann Gulch. What is the fire of Mann Gulch? It is a fire on which are parachuted a commando group of firemen skydivers. It is a true story in which Weick did an onsite survey, has met survivors of this event as out of the 13 firemen skydivers who were released to fight this fire, well, only 11 survived. The team was overworked, in a way, with this cosmological session because they all lost their landmarks at the same time, lost the course of action and how did they loose it? Well, precisely because, at a given time, they said to each other, that they didn't understand the situation anymore. They thought they had to deal with very ordinary fire, we call it a 10 hour fire, in other words which has started less than 10 hours ago, with which they were completely used to being left and, to fight this type of fire, but in reality, it was a lot more serious. The head of the commando group suddenly became aware of it, he didn't have time to explain, he gave some orders which could have saved the life of the team members, especially the order to undo every single tool the firemen were carrying on them, to run towards the top to escape from the fire and then an extraordinary order as it was extraordinarily creative, which consisted of lighting a firewall to shelter, at the centre of this firewall and these two orders led to the whole of the commando group to loose their landmarks. What the use of firemen without tools? Who are firemen who light fires to protect themselves from a main fire? They have lost their landmarks, the way, the meanings which have collapsed and it is this session which shattered the management, which has broken the team. And beyond this session, Weick explains to us a lot of small teams, and especially the start-ups, are confronted with situations, admittedly less dramatic, but which look like, by many points of view, in other words moments where
the whole of the company doesn't understand fully what is going on, looses its landmarks, typically when confronted with difficulties, a market switch, a switch of the situation. The start-ups are, in a way built for success and, suddenly, things go wrong, and clearly everyone looses their landmarks, there are collective fears which are working on it and, there the leader plays a particularly important part. I am not going to go on about it because it will lead us astray, but Weick didn't just describe this incident, this accident of Mann Gulch gives us clues to increase the strength of these small teams, the organisational strength of these start-ups, the creativity, in other words the innovation, the ability to adapt, typically represented by this creative and extraordinary DIY from the leader of the commando group who invents this manœuvre of firewall which unfortunately, will not have side effects as it will not be obeyed, what Weick calls the wisdom, the wisdom as an attitude, in other words a certain distance in relation to the events, a certain distance in relation to the crisis, rightly, the respectful interaction which is missing a lot in this commando group of firemen skydivers, in other words at the end there is no trust between the leader and the members of his team and this trust is built through respectful interactions, in other words through words and the route of each one and all this constitutes in the end a kind of leadership which makes us think when we run a start-up based on these différent elements, on the whole of the attitudes. Therefore Weick goes far with this idea of interaction between the setting and the way and I believe that for all leader of a confronted team, in a start-up, with situations which, naturally, are extremely changeable, complex, the argument on these interactions between the setting and the meaning, how I build the meaning, how I make sense, how I solidify, I structure the company and I build the setting? How do I manage to make the setting and the meaning stronger? This is the key to the action, on which I invite you to think. In a general manner, of course in a team, we are more or less preoccupied with the question of conflict. The conflict can always appear and, especially in difficult situations I have just mentioned and which go through all kind of start-ups. I would like to attract your attention on the fact that we insist a lot to form a team on the idea that it is necessary to have complementarity in this team. And I believe that, this slide reminds of it, the complementarity can transform themselves in antagonisms in difficult situations. When we are very different, and therefore additional, we can become antagonists in situations of crisis and I believe that it is necessary to remember at the time when we form the team and to put ourselves in a position where one has to think about the way in which the team will work in time of crisis. And for this reason, I believe that it is necessary, and this will be my conclusion, to set up a few simple rules right from the start. To define well the methods in decision making within the team, between associates. To think, for example, about the possibilities for ones or for the others on such or such subject to oppose to right to veto, when there is a real feeling that we are making the wrong decision. I am not saying that you always have to, of course apply, but, this question about the right to veto, such or such member of the team is a realistic topic . How, in a general manner, share the responsibilities in the easiest way possible? How to deal with disagreements? What are the precise rules for managing agreements? Do we vote? Is a third party present to interfer in the management of disagreements? And getting ready is always difficult, especially when one is keen to start, to get ready so that the conflicts are sometimes, insuperable and a reliable way to exit is needed for one or the other associates, those founders, those who have started the project. It is never willingly that we think of an exit strategy, but it is necessary to think about it, I would say, when everything is fine, to use a sailing metaphor, because it is not in the midst of a storm and, and God knows if start-ups go through storms, that we sort out this type of problems.
