Gee whiz. I guess this is just confirmation that postings are simply fodder for each person's own conceptual model of the world. My reading of Paul's post was s

Gee whiz. I guess this is just confirmation that postings are simply fodder for each person's own conceptual model of the world. My reading of Paul's post was something entirely different. What I took away (as opposed to whether it was in the article or not ), what I took away was the idea that founder mode is about the rejection of orthodoxy and the triumph of what I call "original thinking". We humans can be the next best thing to lemmings. We do what we see people around us do whether and what we learn in class and from others who we think know something. Is that because we are lemming like or is it because it allows us to deal with the overwhelming chaos of the world? My best illustration of this: I had two friend who went to Nepal for two years. This happened a long time ago. They came back to the US and went to a market and nearly had nervous break downs. In Nepal, they had soap. One kind. In the US they had 200 kinds of dish soap alone. They had no idea which soap to choose, and that extended to almost every product they needed. Our follow instinct - if you see someone else pick up a kind of dish soap, get that - helps us deal with this overwhelming complexity and does well for us. Except when it doesn't. What happens when you are faced with something new? In lemming mode we tend to go wrong when something is new. Really new. Like networking was new. Or little mp3 players (you know - those things that became iPods then iPhones and all the little iPhone killers like the zune.) My take away then was about something completely different, although probably unrelated to either Paul's article or this response. If you are to be a founder, one of the biggest challenges will be to build an organization that does not descend into orthodoxy. [side note: I think founder mode is a misnomer because you can be an original thinker/doer without being a founder] [side note: There are really two situations where you want to be in original thinker mode: when there is something new or when the environment changes dramatically. We are in a time where the latter is true]