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you've heard of conway's law (product structure mirrors org structure)... ever wonder where the chicken-egg loop starts? my theory is that whether it starts with a min viable product or min viable organization, in both cases, they mirror mind structure of the primary founder.
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Won't name specific people, but Myers-Briggs archetypes are good proxies. INTJs will create orgs that look like computer chip architectures ENTPs will create orgs that look like portfolios of experiments ESTJs will create orgs that look like sets of transactional relationships
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ENTJs will create orgs that look like wartime militaries with a specific end goals INTPs will create orgs that look like library building ISTJs will create orgs that look like tool-porn/workflow garages ENFJs will create never-ending parties...
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But better than using personality modeling to predict the org model is using the org model to get a read on the personality model... it's often a good way to reverse engineer the mind of an inscrutable founder... which is one reason paranoid founders keep their orgs opaque too
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But even that's a giveaway. A security-paranoid org where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, is often the sign of an ISTP
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Fun difficult case. A lazy read of Steve Jobs assigns him ENTJ, but a friend persuaded me that he was really an ISTP with a well-integrated shadow-eaten personality. The Apple org culture and product architecture suggests that's true. It's a psycho vigilante product/company.
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The Trump admin is clearly ESFJ while the Obama admin was ESTJ. I can't get a read on the GWB admin possibly because he personally didn't shape it as strongly. Clinton admin screams ENFP.
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Mission statements and manifestos doing the rounds? You've got an INFP founding things. Run, don't walk, to the exits.
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Hari Seldon was clearly an INTP based purely on the fact that his cover story for the First Foundation was encyclopedia writers, and his idea of design was basically institutional memory wrangling via prophecy videos. He'd have done it that way even without psychohistory.
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Myers-Briggs is the simplest and most legible way to explain the concept, but probably not the most useful one in practice. When I try to "read" an org this way, the most useful distinction I've found is between aesthetic vs. functional design. The signs are unmistakeable.
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I avoid orgs that are clearly the result of the founder's aesthetic imagination. This does not mean I look for orgs that have a soulless mechanistic functional feel to them. It means that any elegance in design is the result of trying to solve for function imaginatively.
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This "founder effect" on the structural DNA of an org tends to last a generation past a strong founder. It tends to be erased only when the inevitable Act 2 of bean counters/financial engineers taking over and running it for a while. That phase is a sort of forgetting phase.
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Companies being run by financial engineers are generally horrible to work for, which is one reason the strategy consulting landscape looks bleak right now... 90% of larger companies are being run by such people. Even if they aren't out to game their comp, it's still bleak.
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