'Mode': A Word I Hope I Never Hear In Business Again.
'Mode': A Word I Hope I Never Hear In Business Again.
And what's really needed in entrepreneurial ed today.
A few weeks ago I was mentoring a group of high school students about entrepreneurship, and one student asked the question, “What’s better, founder mode or manager mode?” My heart sank. Clearly he was savvy enough to be up on the latest entrepreneurial lingo, but still naive enough to think these modes were real… as in meaningful. But that’s not what saddened (and surprised) me the most. The real blow was that he perceived them as mutually exclusive and an important career choice he’ll one day face.
I can understand why. Founder mode and manager mode were pitted against one another from the start in Paul Graham’s now famous and infamous essay aptly titled “Founder Mode” (Sep 2024). Then, more mainstream business media used Graham’s essay as a bell ring to start a tussle of egos among high-profile businesspeople, giving them platforms to sound off in favor of one mode vs. the other. Naturally, others took to LinkedIn, X, Medium, and this very platform to join the fight— many coining new phrases like “scale mode”, “owner mode”, and the fem-friendly version “nurture mode”. The “mode” rhetoric was everywhere… for a minute.
With each of these “mode” mentions, I just kept thinking about the different drive modes of my car and how my conversation with the dealer went something like this:
Dealer: “Do you plan on hauling anything?”
Me: “No.”
Dealer: “Do you do a lot of off-roading?”
Me: “Uh, no. Not on purpose.”
Dealer: “Great. Just keep it in Normal all the time and don’t touch these buttons.”
It’s not lost on me that this conversation may have gone differently with my husband on the scene because— well— he’s a man. And also because he strangely gets a thrill from pressing buttons (something I’ve never understood). But, let’s be real. The gist of the dealer’s message was simple: “None of these different modes really matter, and 99% of the time you just want to be Normal.”