I am often mildly irritated when I see business strategists over-complicating things. There can be an unrealistic dogmatism in insisting that to be successful, an organisation must have these precise qualities and do this exact combination of things, in this particular order. The technology industry is rife with this deterministic attitude, which is ironic when you consider the haphazard and accident-strewn history of the sector.
Conversely, there is a certain delight in talking to the most experienced business leaders, who have seen a thing or two and usually speak about their achievements in unfailingly simple terms.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Business Leaders Network Growth Forum, a gathering of 100-plus entrepreneurs and senior executives taking place in Cambridge. As well as enjoying some of the simpler pleasures of the day (conversation with interesting people, lunch, and the chance to tweet about our host's sartorial choices), we learnt about how some really top-notch speakers are approaching their companies' current challenges to growth.
It would be nice to distil their many brilliant insights into an impressive formula for success. But in fact my favourite quote of the day was a somewhat post-modern statement from Hermann Hauser, the celebrated UK tech entrepreneur, founder of Acorn Computers and latterly VC firm Amadeus. Having been involved in more high-tech ventures than you can shake a stick at, Hauser has an extremely clear view of the biggest factor governing success or failure. It is, and I quote, "random"!
Tudor Brown, co-founder of ARM, provided similarly down-to-earth insights. ARM is a huge British success story; spun out of ailing Acorn in 1990, its market cap today is £4.65 billion. I wondered what Tudor made of today's climate for tech entrepreneurs: has it changed somewhat since 1990? Tudor's response was both simple and salutary. Today you can write your slides in the taxi on the way to the meeting, he said: back then you had to print them off in the hotel. Apart from that, the challenges of growing a new technology business are pretty much the same.
So what else is important? Paradigm-shifting new technology, a brilliant market strategy? No, mainly just people. The quality of people involved in a venture, especially that of the CEO (cited by Hauser as the key factor, after "random" of course); capturing know-how; building the culture; managing a growing workforce.
Time and again, every speaker came back to people. But 'people issues' tend to be stubbornly resistant to systematizing, and given the levels of subjectivity involved it is probably wisest to avoid formulae. We all know that the CEO is important, but everyone has different ideas about what is important in a CEO. Just to take a few people that I spoke to on the day:
Mark Sebba, CEO of Net-a-Porter, cited his strong working partnership with Natalie Massenet as evidence that contrasting personalities at the top can work wonders. Richard Longdon of AVEVA - a company which has successfully navigated through government ownership, privatisation, public listing and MBO - spoke about being flexible and overcoming the natural aversion to change. And serial media entrepreneur David Soskin, currently Chairman of mysupermarket.co.uk, told me how he has learnt the basics of each new digital discipline as it appears on the scene, rather than being totally reliant on his marketing staff. A variety of leaders with different personal styles, responding to different circumstances, yet all I dare say equally successful.
At bottom, the diversity of ideas about how to grow a great company shows the discipline for what it really is: an art, not a dismal science. And those of us who enjoy the drama and the surprises say, long may it remain that way.
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