Reflective Blog II
My second blog is
about an entrepreneur that I have met in Chicago during my Summer School at
Kendall College. It is going to be all about Dwight Koop, the cofounder and COO
of CohesiveFT and his leadership skills. I have spent some time with him when
he visited the College for a panel on July 16th.
“We help enterprise
use cloud infrastructure”: CohesiveFT is one of the original cloud networking
companies. It is a Chicago-based growth-stage business that helps enterprise
organizations to run production systems in the cloud since 2008. The main
product is called “VNS3” (network routing and security solution). Over 700
customers extend networks to create clouds.
CohesiveFT is a
pioneer in this market and offer more networking software than all the
competitors if you would combine them. The team around Dwight is experienced in
everything concerning software and networking.
I guess, Dwight is
a democratic/ participative leader. The democratic leadership style is a very
open and productive style of running a team. These leaders motivate their
employees to participate in the business’ processes. Everyone has the possibility
to spend his or her ideas and start a discussion about it. This style is needed
in dynamic and rapidly changing environments where new ideas are needed more
than anything else. In these fast moving organizations, every option for
improvement has to be considered. I think that CohesiveFT as a cloud networking
(IT-based) necessarily requires leaders like Dwight to be successful.
I was inspired of
Dwight’s speech about his job and his life as an entrepreneur. He encourages
his employees to come up with new things to think about. Of course, he as the
COO of CohesiveFT has to make the last decisions but his employees all feel
responsible for their tasks and the business.
He also was the COO
of many businesses (e.g. Bedouin Inc., Signet Assurance) and thus I believe he
knows what he is talking about. Dwight said that it is important to have a
special attitude in order to become a successful entrepreneur and business
owner. You have to be inspired of your business idea and like to work hard to
realize it.
I am not sure yet
if I would really like to become such a busy businessman but I think that the democratic
leadership style is the best way to lead employees (it does not matter if you
are the COO or just the chief of four employees). I do not believe that I have
changed my mind regarding my preferred leadership skills because I knew before
that the participative open style works out well. But I believe that by
watching and talking to people like Dwight helps everybody to train and improve
his or her leading behavior.
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