Steve Jobs didn’t see the power of the App Store until a year after the idea was introduced. He originally wanted all of software on iPhone to be designed by Apple.
Travis Kalanick only wanted to focus on premium black cars at Uber. He only moved to the UberX model (now the most popular) once a competitor, Lyft, forced his hand.
Marissa Mayer decided to keep layoffs secret at Yahoo! to avoid bad publicity. She didn’t think it would create paranoia among most employees, which it did.
Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM, famously said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” He didn’t think computers would become a universallyadopted technology.
The vast majority of businesses fail. If they don’t fail, founders and CEOs still get it wrong all the time.
No one, including the founder or CEO, can see everything. Often the greatest ideas come from within or outside the company, but not from between the ears of the founder.