The Founder Authority Model: A Governance Specification for Expert-Centric Organisations

This working paper specifies the Founder Authority Model: a governance architecture in which the founder's intellectual authority is formalised into transmissible organisational structure rather than delegated away, enabling expert-centric organisations to scale operational capacity while retaining methodological control.Conventional scaling frameworks treat founder dependency as an operational defect to be engineered out. This assumption fails in organisations where proprietary methodology, quality assurance, and brand legitimacy are structurally embedded in one person and cannot be delegated without loss of the value they generate.The paper specifies the model's four components, the conditions under which each becomes operationally necessary, the dependency order governing their implementation, a four-item diagnostic instrument for assessing organisational readiness, and the boundary conditions delimiting its transferability.The specification derives from practice-based doctoral research employing an intrinsic single-case design applied to a founder-led online education institution. Sixty-eight open codes were generated from three triangulated evidence streams and consolidated into five governance dimensions. The model's claim is analytical rather than statistical.The extended empirical treatment is published as: Natseva, S. (2026). The Founder Authority Model: Scaling Online Education Without Losing Intellectual Control. Horizon Books. ISBN 978-619-7850-04-8.