Big, old-fashioned companies are always aware of new companies trying to enter an established market in a new and innovative way. "Disruption" is the word you here everywhere these days but the real reason startups are dangerous for old companies are employees.
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There are numerous theories how to keep your employees engaged and productive - some of them brilliant, majority of them naive - but what separates startup employees from their colleagues in big, established, old companies?
The difference is creation.
Startup employees creating something from the scratch. They haven't been employed in an organization with well-established corporate culture and products, they were forced - driven by their desire to create something new and change the world - to create something that the world didn't see before.
As such, they have some qualities that make them very competitive, very creative, and very business-oriented.
Startup employees, those present in their small company from the day one, are integrators. They are able to see both the engineering and the business side of their job at the same time. They are forced to do several different jobs and that trains them to develop a diverse set of abilities.
Startup employees don't need expensive and long-lasting market analysis: they know what they are doing and what their customers want. In some cases they even create a new industry.
Thus, they don't have to waste their time on analysis, meetings, endless talks... They just work.
Startup employees are competitive folks, very competitive. They know that they can succeed only if they give their best because no established company will let them take the market just like that. They have to make something far better then expected in order to shake the market.
At the same time, they are not competitive like people in big companies with all office gossips, battles for a higher position, and all other human-related business-unrelated activities. Startup employees are competing with themselves, trying to do better than yesterday because that will lead to a better product.
Startup employees excel in communications. That's obvious: They must sell their product without support from a massive marketing division. And if they don't sell it, all the work goes in vain. They are all aware of that and they speak with such passion they can easily sell a fridge on the North Pole, as the saying goes.
And the final knock-out for the big companies: startup employees are sharing their ideas all day, every day. They try, they improvise, they talk to each other, they fail, they try again.
Keeping all that in mind, it's easy to see why well-established business leaders are joining startups: their environment is so healthy it reminds us of days when we just worked, without layers of management teams and when it was so easy to solve every problem. ■