Les McKeown's Predictable Success Blog
The underlying reason for AOL’s seeping, intractable lack of success is simple – too many Visionaries.
As I show in my upcoming book, “The Synergist: Leading Your Team to Predictable Success”, a top team can work well with multiple Processors and Operators, but too many Visionaries spoils the broth. (See: Jobs and Sculley, Jay-Z and Nas, Sumner Redstone and just about anybody).
Tim Armstrong is undoubtedly a Visionary. So is Arianna Huffington. Michael Arrington is one in spades. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in you-know-where that they will ever play nice together. Yet over and over again business deals get completed that throw two incompatible Visionaries together in a triumph of hopeful greed over oft-repeated experience.
You don’t scale vision by adding more Visionaries at the top – all that does is create warring fiefdoms. You scale vision by pushing it down into the organization. AOL doesn’t get this, and doesn’t look like it ever will.
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