Founder's Mentality and the paths to sustainable growth

This is a good video from Bain in their Founder's Mentality series. It discusses some of the benefits that come with scale and scope as organizations grow, and some of the losses to Founder's Mentality (or startup mentality, as I've heard it called elsewhere) that can also accompany that growth. Perhaps most insidiously, the benefits gained with scale and scope can mask the damage of losing that Founder's Mentality - and recovering it can be far more difficult than maintaining it.
The whole thing is worth a watch, but two parts particularly resonated with me:

• The idea of frontline obsession. In a startup, you're talent obsessed, customer obsessed, and advocacy obsessed. As companies grow, and the frontline is no longer at the table for strategic conversations (instead replaced by managers or managers of managers), the company is increasingly distanced from the real experience of the customer.
• The addition and codification of process and procedure, while important, brings other dangers. If these serve to attract talent that only wants to work from a manual, only following predefined processes, then they lead to an organization that eschews large individual or organizational risks. This incumbency mindset is a major step down the path of an organization becoming a struggling bureaucracy.

Most fast-growing companies aspire to global leadership in their industries. They often start as insurgents: fast, agile and adaptable. But to win in the long term they must scale, often losing what we call the Founder's Mentality. Bain's James Allen explains the elements of Founder's Mentality and the "winds" that can blow a company off course.