Firefight of a Founder

Authors:

Academic Partner:

LEVEL

Undergraduate, MBA, Executive Ed, Graduate

TYPE

Single Player

DURATION

60 mins

DISCIPLINE

Leadership & Organisational Behaviour

Introduction

You are Elan Rusk, a serial founder who cashes out of one company and bets the winnings on the next impossible one, from 1995 to 2025. You decide how hard to drive people, how loudly to speak, how far to override the board, what to spend on safety and how big to bet. Booms, crashes and regulators arrive whether you are ready or not, and every stakeholder loses faith if you stand still. The boldest bet is your strongest engine of progress and spends something from almost every other stakeholder, while the dilemmas inside the company are logged, never scored. You are judged on the shape you end as: empire builder, breaker of people, or both. You learn that audacity builds the empire, and that timing and mitigation, not timidity, decide what it costs.

Learning Objectives

Balance five leadership levers against six stakeholder metrics, recognising that every aggressive setting buys one metric by spending another.
Evaluate when audacious bets justify their cost to employees, the board and public goodwill.
Diagnose cumulative stakeholder damage before a metric crosses its breaking point and records a permanent strike.
Distinguish company performance from leadership character when choosing responses to in-company ethical dilemmas.
Adapt leadership posture to exogenous market shocks across seven eras rather than holding one fixed style.

Key Features

Players step into the shoes of Elan Rusk, a fictional serial founder, across three decades of building, selling and betting on new companies.
Each round players make five leadership choices, such as how hard to push the team, how bold to be in public and how big a bet to take.
Six measures, including employee morale, board confidence, public goodwill and company cash, carry over between rounds and slowly decline if the founder stands still.
Market events and difficult in-company dilemmas test the founder, and players' responses to the dilemmas are recorded to reveal leadership style rather than scored.
Players are ranked separately on each measure, and the facilitator can see every player's leadership profile and decisions to guide class discussion.

Educational Outcomes

Ability to read a leadership choice as a trade across stakeholder groups, pricing what an aggressive posture spends in morale, board trust and public goodwill.
Ability to use mitigation, such as investment in people and safety, to buy down the damage of a high-pace, high-control strategy before it compounds.
Recognition that caution is not the safe option when every metric decays each round, and that a passive caretaker builds nothing and still accumulates crises.
Recognition that strong company results do not vindicate leadership conduct when the behavioural record shows broken people, and that brilliance and character cannot be netted against each other.
Players come away understanding that founder audacity is both the engine of progress and the source of its blow-ups, and that the lesson is timing and mitigation, not timidity.

Topics Covered

Dark Triad Leadership Traits

Stakeholder Management and Trade-Offs

Ethical Decision Making

Serial Entrepreneurship

Employee Wellbeing and Retention