Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric quotes, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
In entrepreneurship, every good or bad decision is the result of one’s vision followed by either success or failure however small or big. Vision is the drive that gets an entrepreneur going. A simple foresight of what future will or could look like can change the course of how a business is done.
Vision not only determines the success of an organization, but also frames its culture, norms, and organizational structure. A visionary entrepreneur will know what the business will look like and every aspect of its process or as a finished form.
Elon Musk revolutionized the industries by looking beyond the present and understanding what the future should and will look like. He was able to find his way up from bankruptcy of both of his companies by taking risks because he knew what the future looked like for both Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
Vision has held hands of many successful entrepreneurs and made them what they are today. Here are the reasons why an entrepreneur should be visionary and visionary entrepreneurship is the future of business.
1. Vision Frames the Entire Business
Vision forms and sets the culture, which is an element that is shared between employees and hence, creates norms and duties that outlines how the total organization acts. It is the driving force that leads an organization.
A visionary entrepreneur is able to create the desired culture in an organization and shape its actions. Successful entrepreneurs like, Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have had visions that were so driven and sometimes even impossible to hold onto that those visions are still the reason behind company’s current framework.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook has set a culture of personally welcoming all new employees, despite his company’s large staff count. The culture he set didn’t go out of track even with impossibly large number of staffs to entertain.
2. Visionary Leaders can Understand Risk
Richard Branson is one of the best-known visionary risk-takers in the business. The founder of Virgin has undertaken ambitious ideas from starting his own phone service with Virgin Mobile to unsettling the airline industry as a whole. He has been manhandling an adequate number of business ideas by seeking for a good vision in risk and benefiting from it instead of catching blunder mistakes through it.
Visionary leaders can analyze the benefits that a risk will bring and also are able to understand which kind of risk is a big ‘no’.
3. A Good Vision can Ensure Survival in Changing Environment
The business environment is ever changing. From internal to the external environment, an entrepreneur needs to have a clear vision of knowing the track of change and pre-adopting to the change. Great visions lead to the futuristic approach to survival, ensuring well-being not only in the current situation but in many unavoidable changes in the business environment. Surviving change requires a great strategy which is inspired by a good vision.
4. Vision Tempts Innovation
Nick Woodman invented GoPro as a result of his own personal needs. He wanted to take videos while surfing and hence, his vision of what a camera should be like led him to the invention of GoPro, which revolutionized the world of videography.
Innovation is often the result of seeing or dreaming of a future that isn’t thought possible by countless. Visionary entrepreneurs look at the world from a different angle and renovate their vision into innovation.
5. Vision is the Key to Focus
Since vision sets a framework, it gets a person working around one single idea instead of deviating and jumping from and to different ideas. No success is ever achieved by clusters of thoughts but by the single idea that freezes into a mission. A clear vision will define a path for an entrepreneur and hence prevent straying of the mind.
In HBO’s documentary on Warren Buffet, two successful entrepreneurs, Buffet and Bill Gates are shown sitting at a table, asked to write down on a piece of paper the one thing that they each felt accredited most to their success. Buffett and Gates had written down the same thing on their papers: focus. A good vision is linked with great focus and focus, an attribute for success.
