VOL 11 - BLIND SPOT by Lawrence M. Schneider

The report looks reassuring. The leadership meeting is calm. Customer complaints appear manageable. Then a strong executive resigns, a major account threatens to leave, or a 
costly problem surfaces—and you discover that people inside the company understood the risk long before you did.
 
That is a founder blind spot.
 
Blind Spot is not about careless leadership, poor intelligence, or a lack of self-awareness. It examines something more difficult: what happens when authority changes the way reality 
travels through a company. Employees soften bad news. Managers solve around the founder rather than risk disruptive involvement. Loyal people receive different standards. 
Familiar explanations become protected from new evidence. The founder remains informed—and still does not see what the organization has already learned.
 
Lawrence M. Schneider names the operating patterns that create this gap:
 
The Founder Perception Gap — the distance between how the founder interprets the business and how employees, customers, and systems experience it.
Confidence Becoming Certainty — when a founder’s early conclusion organizes the room before independent evidence can speak.
The Founder Echo — when repeated founder behavior becomes the company’s unwritten law.
Decision Distortion — when authority, history, urgency, or identity changes how evidence is weighed.
Loyalty That Changes the Evidence — when tenure, contribution, or personal history quietly alters accountability.
Guilt as an Operating System — when difficult but necessary decisions are postponed to protect someone from immediate pain.
Truth That Never Reaches You — when information is filtered, softened, delayed, or made harmless as it travels upward.
Overwhelm as Avoidance — when useful activity protects the founder from the consequential decision that could change the system.
The Story That Explains Everything — when a once-valid company narrative becomes more powerful than current reality.