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At that moment, I became fully aware of my inadequacy as a manager, so I stopped enjoying my work to the extent I had when I was working directly with computers. Attempts to take control and manage the company’s performance and productivity only led to quarrels with my partners, which in turn impeded the management of employees. Operating efficiency was too low, and we were not only losing control of the company’s position in the market but also losing clients, although usually our bids won out and led to profitable contracts, allowing us to keep our heads above water. But I understood that unless we changed our methods of managing the company, our days were numbered.

The only problem I saw then was the differences of opinion with my partners, whose own ambitions, it seemed to me, kept them from allowing me to be an effective CEO.

If a person is incompetent, he cannot grasp what is actually the source of his problems. He therefore focuses his attention on some contrived reason for a specific problem, which of course does not help to solve the problem. This is how an unskilled computer user behaves when, in attempting to deal with errors, he completely reformats the hard drive and reinstalls the operating system. He does this over and over, but if the real reason for the computer errors is an overheated processor or memory failures, this will not solve the problem. Thus I, too, thought at the time that the only way to deal with the company’s problem was to reformat existing relationships. In the end, I did indeed reformat them, but not with the desired result. There were three partners, and I, finding myself in the minority, had to leave the company.