Over a month ago, in my post Your Boss: Value & Madness of an Entrepreneur I wrote about quirkiness and impatience of people who have brilliance to come up with original start-up ideas and guts to build a company from scratch – people who provide us, CFO's and Controllers, with new job opportunities beyond "Big Business."
I also discussed how their peculiar and difficult qualities are the main source of our frustrations. I called the sum of these character traits the Entrepreneurial Bug.
As if to support my point of view, September 18th issue of New York Times featured this article in their Business Day section – Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs by David Segal. I highly recommend that everyone interested in the subject of entrepreneurship, start-ups and venture capital investment should read it.
Of course, my own primary interest was the excursion into psychology of the indicators so characteristic of our bosses difficult behavior. Needless to say, the article confirms that not every subject is afflicted with the entire spectrum of symptoms and displays them with the same intensity. Nevertheless, the author clearly states that only "a thin line separates" an entrepreneur from a psychiatric candidate with a hypomanic syndrome.
One of the article's subjects, Seth Priebatsch, echoes my post from 08/19/2010, when he "describes anything that distracts him… even for minutes, as 'evil.'" No surprise here – I've heard this before many-many times from various CEO's. The difficulties of working with people like that on daily basis, especially for CFO's and Controllers, whose job is to keep businesses in order and under control, is basically one of the main themes of this blog.
Mr. Segal goes out of his way explaining that the degree of craziness is what matters: some Venture Capital firms give personality tests to their prospects in order to determine if they are not completely bonkers. But I couldn't help myself thinking that these tests may be also designed to weed out people who are not crazy enough to be satisfactory material for future transition from idea generators into screw tighteners.
Strangely enough, the New York Times' confirmation that my extrapolation of personal experience dealing with business owners to the rest of the entrepreneurial world is completely justified, did not bring any intellectual satisfaction. It's kind of discouraging that if you choose to build your career in dynamic growing businesses, you will always have to deal with bosses who cannot help themselves not to be assholes.
The Frustrated CFO 