political theory to understand international relations

hechtosaurus

Political Theory for Startups

There’s a rudimentary theory in Political Science that international relations and foreign policy can be explained through a combination of three major forces: personal actors, nations, and systemic conditions (international climate). In order to understand major policies or an individual nation’s behavior, one must analyze all of these conditions. For instance, if you wanted to know why the Roosevelt Corollary to The Monroe Doctrine was drafted in 1904, you would have to perform a psychoanalysis of Theodore Roosevelt, research national sentiments and politics, and factor in the international climate of the time. No single analysis will sufficiently explain why the Corollary was adopted, but a combination of the three will provide a comprehensive answer.

This same theory can also be applied to explain the behavior of startups. You can learn a lot, and predict a lot, by understanding the way a Founder or CEO thinks, understanding the behaviors and sentiments of a startup’s users and core staff, and evaluating the external forces at play (e.g. competition, VCs, legal issues, etc.). When it comes down to major events such as acquisitions, UI and API alterations, new funding, and strategic partnerships, a one-dimensional explanation won’t tell you anything. You have to look at decision-making from a macro-perspective.

There’s a lot of oversimplification when it comes down to explaining why some startups are successful and some are failures. Many argue that the success of a startup is determined by how entrepreneurial its founder is (personal), and some argue that success is situational (i.e. the timing of a product’s entrance in a market, a need for innovation in a specific field, etc.). This can be dangerous, especially when people devote all of their attention to one specific area instead of trying to understand the big picture. With startups, successes, failures, and important decisions are not one-dimensional - they’re determined by individual leaders, product users, and externalities.