"Crowning the company king" is one of our fundamental tenets. It means that the company's interests come ahead of everyone else's, including shareholders, staff, customers. Most often these interests are aligned, but sometimes they are not, and that's where the philosophy has its greatest power.

What happens when the owner is no longer the right person to lead the company, or even own it? The inevitable is preceded by the unwatchable: someone builds a great business and just at the point they should be able to kick back, it turns out that if the company is to prosper, different leadership is required. It's painful for everyone.

I'm thinking of a couple of cases in point. In both, the founder has been an enormous driving force. These guys hate to lose and they've done whatever it takes to make sure they (and the company) have come out on top. They've driven their companies (and themselves) to the peak of the business life cycle.

But their companies are now declining. And part of the reason for the decline is that for the leaders, it has become more about them and less about the company. Imperceptibly, incrementally, the company is for their benefit rather than them being for the benefit of the company.

By the way, they don't see the decline. And of course they don't see them themselves as part of the problem. They keep dong what they've always done in these situations, what's always worked in the past. But that's the point: what worked in the past won't work now because the motivations are different. They need to be helped to see that the best thing they can do for the company and for themselves is to let it go and find something else. That is not a single discussion. It is a series of painful discussions over quite a period of time.

But the sooner it is started, the sooner the right question ("who should lead this company?") can be answered.