Founder as continuous “Idea Articulator”
Michael Gerber’s E-Myth process encourages any business or organisational owner to design themselves out of the organisation. It takes responsibility away from the founder for articulating the core ideas of the organisation.
It sounds great when you read it, “I’ll never need to write another blog post again! I’ll just get my employees to write ‘top 5 ways to X’. I’m too busy to articulate my ideas publicly.” This is how I thought about Bitesize Irish, and for a long time delegated writing of blog posts.
Seth Godin takes his role differently: he is the articulator of ideas for his organisation. He blogs daily, which is the cornerstone of his business. He podcasts weekly. He designs how to deliver workshops online. He coordinates employees/freelancers to help execute his vision.
In the world of hiring as fast as possible, or outsourcing your organisation’s regular tasks as much as possible, it’s easy to delegate the wrong things. The founder’s responsibility is to keep laying down what the alternative future is and will be. You do that publicly and regularly. Publicly, because you should have nothing to hide. Regularly, because the universe is continually finding inertia to slow down what you want to achieve.