Eoghan McCabe: prediction

Transcript context

…You said that this was very unpopular. I imagine many people were not happy with all the change and how top-down this was, you said there was a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? I never heard that story. When you make that degree of change and you tell people that they're in control like we did in the previous generation of late-stage businesses, there's going to be some friction when you change the rules. And it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally, yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome. If I make decisions that propel the company in the way that thankfully my decisions have, I get rewards and kudos and I get to go back to the board and say, I want a bigger grant. If I don't, I get fired and I should get fired. If my big, brave, unilateral decisions put us in the toilet, then I have to take responsibility for that also. So, that's how in my humble opinion, it should work. And I, for one, don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way. You'll see from time to time, I did this a couple of years ago, people will construct these indexes of the performance of companies that are founder led, and of course this is a self-serving statement, but it's also true. And surprise, surprise, the founder led companies perform substantially better because they have the moral authority and the willingness to take the risks that the professional CEOs don't have the remit for. The professional CEOs are typically told, don't mess things up, and the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk of messing things up from time to time. And so that's in my opinion, what creates greatness and great innovation. But like I said, there will be friction changing a company that's configured for democracy and committee decisions and soft and gentle interactions and communication to be properly founder led and top down. So, a big lesson here is if you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, there's a lot of resistance. You may need to go hardcore founder mode and make some significant change. What percentage of the employees kind of turned over during this period?…

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