Can you run two businesses at once?

Whenever someone asks me a question related to focus, I almost always bring up one of my favorite lines from the movie Sweet Home Alabama: “You can’t ride two horses with one ass.”

It’s true that it won’t be easy for Jack Dorsey to run two different companies in two different markets (Twitter and Square), especially since Square just announced its IPO. Elon Musk, a guy who is in the middle of doing something similar, said as much recently.

If I were a potential investor in Square, my confidence in the ability of the company to execute would be negatively impacted by Dorsey’s divided allegiances, but it wouldn’t necessarily dissuade me from doing the deal.

Can Dorsey pull it off? Paulo Prochno, a clinical professor of management at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has some great insights, and my own quick analysis is:

Read the rest at The Business Journals