By Chris Heivly, Techstars Senior Vice President for Ecosystem Development

Some business pundits talk about maker time vs. manager time, referring to the times of the day you are creating vs. managing. Can you do both? Are you good at one of those and not the other?

Ever see the DISC profiling system that labels you one of four different personality types (D - I - S - C)? How about Myers-Briggs, which has 16 different personality flavors? Both of these systems tell you who you are and how you — as you — can be effective working or communicating with others who are not like you.

Did anyone ever describe you as someone who can “make the trains run on time”? Or the opposite: you are not someone who makes the trains run on time, but someone who creates the tracks and the train?

The answer is that a great business needs a balance of both visionaries (train and track designers) and engineers (operators). 

Problems arise when this is out of balance. This can be applied at every stage of a business’s growth arc.

What does all of this have to do with community building?

I have observed that there seem to be more community enthusiasts who are engineers than visionaries and that imbalance, if you will, stunts a community's growth just like it stunts a company's growth. The engineer mindset is one of order, a bias towards precision, and a notion that more of both applied to community activities will drive progress. I guess this is vision from an engineering point of view.

But I see a trap in this thinking. My business partner at Techstars, Ian Hathaway, in his new book with Brad Feld, The Startup Community Way, addresses part of this in the chapter titled the “Myth of Quantity.” Ian writes:

More of everything thinking goes something like this: if we just get more of everything, we can create a vibrant startup community. We need more capital, more innovation centers, more accelerators, more incubators, more university programs, more startup events. More, more more. It follows linear systems thinking whereby an increase in the critical inputs . . . increases desired outputs. The problem is, More of Everything doesn't work.

Read a mini-interview with Ian Hathaway about why he and Brad Feld wrote The Startup Community Way — and why it’s required reading for all startup community builders

Bringing this back to the need for community visionaries, It is imperative that your strategy, your vision, the community mission be pointed in the right direction. Brad and Ian’s book goes a long way to outlining a mindset and framework for the right direction.

Or said another way, make sure that your community has a balance of engineers and visionaries with the mindset and experience to back up both before investing.

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