I think Entrepreneur Corner at VentureBeat is a great resource for entrepreneurs. I love some of the guest posts they have. I will feaure them on this blog regularly.
There is one post by Sean O’Malley called future proofing your company’s vision. It nails what a vision means in the context of a startup which is very different from that of a large organization.
You’ve heard time and time again that vision matters. But ‘vision’ is a loaded word. Everyone thinks they know what it means, but everyone’s definition varies slightly.
In fact, I rarely use the word but instead ask the question: ‘What do you hope the future will hold for your company and customers?’ What’s so remarkable about this question is that it asks an entrepreneur to take a perspective on what the world will look like several years down the road. It also drives every decision thereafter.
Most startups have a hard time defining a vision because they’ve seen visions from larger companies that seem so abstract. For example, here is a vision statement from a Fortune 500 company that I’ll leave unnamed, “Powered by Innovation, Guided by Integrity, We Help Our Customers Achieve Their Most Challenging Goals.” Generic visions like this don’t inspire or drive action and inevitably get tucked away in an employee’s desk.
Successful visions bring a unique perspective and are delivered with enough clarity and conviction to ensure they stick.
Without clarity of vision, your company is on a journey with the destination unknown. I experienced the effect of unclear visions when I worked for Yahoo! in early 2000.
Yahoo’s vision had something to do with providing users with delightful web experiences. It’s pathetic I can’t remember the details and I bet you’d find very few who could in those days. (In fact, I did a web search and couldn’t find anything specific on the subject.) As a product leader at the time, this lack of clarity allowed me to operate in a silo that didn’t fully consider the company’s overall vision. It also opened up the door for everyone to act reactively to every new competitive threat.
Conversely, almost every Yahoo! employee at the time knew Google’s vision, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” You can make an argument that the current market cap of Yahoo! (~$20B) vs. Google (~$140B) tells a lot about the impact of this vision clarity.
But, now that I’ve told you how important vision is, I’m going to seemingly contradict myself. I’ve never started a company from a blank piece of paper with what I’ve defined as a vision.
Instead, every startup that I’ve worked on began with a ‘perspective’ that over time grew into an opportunity, which ultimately translated into a vision.
A perspective faces the realities of a market and defines an audience, problem and customer experience that opens up an opportunity in the market. When approached in an iterative fashion, where perspectives and opportunities are revisited, entrepreneur’s visions can morph to cast a wider net to inspire bigger and greater things. This is what I call the vision wedge approach.
I think having a clear, concrete vision is important for a startup but it should be something that should evolve as part of the prcess that figures out product market fit. This is my experience with something I am working on right now. Our vision started somewhere but then as we got the market feedback while selling the product to customers our vision got much bigger at the same time remained as clear and concrete. So I completely identify with the article.
