The Passion Principle: Founder-Led Nations and Organizations Outperform the Rest?
As I reflect on the state of leadership in both the corporate and political realms, I can’t help but notice a striking parallel between founder CEOs and the founding leaders of nations. Just as a visionary founder can make or break a company’s long-term success, the presence or absence of a committed founding leader can profoundly shape a country’s trajectory.
In the business world, we often see a stark contrast between founder CEOs and their successors. Founders like Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Jeff Bezos at Amazon are known for their relentless customer focus, bold long-term vision, and willingness to innovate. They have an intimate understanding of their business and a deep emotional stake in its success. This founder’s mentality permeates the culture and keeps the company anchored to its original mission.
Professional CEOs, on the other hand, can struggle to fill those visionary shoes. Too often, they seem to prioritize short-term gains and lose sight of the customer experience that made the company great in the first place. Google is a prime example — since the founders stepped back, the company seems to lurch from one strategy to the next, launching and killing off products with dizzying speed. Where is the cohesive vision?
There are exceptions, of course. Tim Cook has admirably carried on Steve Jobs’ legacy at Apple, keeping the company hugely profitable while preserving its unique identity. But Cook is more of a “semi-founder” given his long tenure and close partnership with Jobs. Most professional CEOs simply don’t have that institutional knowledge and personal investment.
The same dynamics play out on the national stage. Countries like India were blessed with idealistic founding leaders who set a clear direction after independence. But subsequent generations of politicians seem to have lost the plot, pursuing narrow agendas rather than a unifying national purpose. The contrast with a country like the UAE is stark — there, you get the sense that the leadership, for all its flaws, still feels a deep sense of duty to national development.
So what’s the lesson here? To me, it’s about the irreplaceable power of a founder’s vision in setting the DNA of an organization, whether a startup or a nation-state. Founders pour their heart and soul into their creation. They’re not just building a product or an institution, but an ideal. And that passion is infectious — it inspires employees, citizens and stakeholders to dream bigger and reach higher than they thought possible.
Of course, no founder can lead forever. The challenge is to instill that founding spirit into the culture, so it endures beyond any one individual. Founders need to be talent magnets, bringing in people who share their sense of purpose. They need to build systems and tell stories that carry the torch forward. So that even as leadership changes hands, the soul of the enterprise remains true.
It’s a tall order, especially in politics where the currents of popular opinion can easily sweep away the old guard. But as citizens, we should demand more from our leaders than just technocratic competence. We should seek out and elevate those rare figures with the clarity of vision to point the way and the force of character to stay the course. Because when a founder’s lofty ideals light the path, there’s no telling how high we can climb together.
Note: I want to be transparent — this article was written with the help of Perplexity. As someone who isn’t a professional writer, I found it incredibly helpful in fleshing out and articulating my ideas in an engaging way. I believe tools like this can help more people contribute to important conversations, regardless of their writing background. I hope you find the ideas valuable, even if the prose itself isn’t entirely my own.
