Getting started
The Role of Vision In Your Business
What I want to do today though, is really show you how to use vision to get everyone on the same page and executing. So I'm gonna flip forward in my slide deck a little bit and walk you guys through some of the challenges that are out there. Why is vision important? Why do you even need a vision? Why can't we just go keep working? Right? That's one thing that comes up. A lot of times when I'm talking with people, a leader will say, "well, we all know what to do already". Or maybe there is friction from someone who's an individual contributor. That individual contributor will say, "we all know what to do. We don't really need a vision, do we?" But what you're going to find is very quickly, In particular, if you're in an environment with a lot of change or where you're trying to drive growth, that without s a simple form of vision, it becomes very difficult to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
What you see on the slide here is the way we normally think about the game of business.We have us and our team on one side. We have some kind of end game, the prize at the other end, and we think that this is a straight line. And when we get there, we're going to have unicorns and rainbows and rocket ships and all those good things. In reality, it's a little different. In reality, it's kind of fuzzy over here. The end game isn't always clear. People may even understand the day-to-day workings or at least activities of your business, but that doesn't mean they understand where we're trying to go with the business. And without that, you start to get a lot of questions, a lot of concerns. Your team's resilience goes down, your ability to execute goes down, and you can start to have these tiny shifts in understanding that drive people out in many different directions or even in circles, right? I ought to update this to show some circles, but the key idea is that it begins to feel like you're herding cats out there, and that's not good for anybody. It's just not healthy, and it's not good for your business.
But it's really important to understand because all things being equal, the success and failure rates of businesses that get started are actually quite low. Of the companies that make it to their first million, that's only four out of a hundred to begin with, only four out of a thousand make it to their first 10 million. So even if you're just starting out, it can be really useful to get a strong sense of vision and where you're going. We're going to talk about that today because what this is going to do for you is change the story that we're creating here.
Vision with values sets up guard rails and boundaries
So instead of just having this cat herding phenomenon, we're going to set up some boundaries, some guardrails that give people enough. A sense of the boundaries that we're working within, so that can all stay moving in the same direction. Even when we start to bounce up against those boundaries, it makes it much easier for us to re-sync, adjust and get back on the same page.