Executives who say they’d love to leave the corporate battleship to skipper a nimble start-up fall back on a variety of perfectly legitimate rationales for why it’s not yet time: I need to acquire more credibility, to figure out how financing really works, to maintain stability at home while my children are young, and so on. But while they are waiting for everything to fall into place, managers are acquiring big-company habits that can hurt them when they finally make the move.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review.