Built to last - The role vision plays
"Built To Last — Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" by James Collins and Jerry Porras, is one of the best books ever written (at least we think so!) on the importance of vision in building a lasting, successful business. There is little doubt that your starting point to growing your business must be the vision you have for its future – the way you want your business to be when it’s done, so to speak. Profit goals, staffing needs, what kind of lifestyle you’d like it to achieve for you and more. How clear you are all on that is critical. Refer to the last edition’s article titled: ‘Working Backwards Takes You Forward …Huh?’
From there your success may be measured by how well you are able to communicate that vision to the people who will be helping you achieve it — your team — and how committed you are to having them and yourself work on building your business as well as serving your customers. Here’s what the owner of what once was a small business has to say about becoming successful:
"IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would like when it was finally done. You might say that I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream — my vision — was in place.
The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.
The third reason that IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture in place of how IBM would look when the dream was in place, and how such a company would have to act, I then realised that unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realised that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day, we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and at the start of the following day, we set out to make up the difference.
Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn't do business at IBM, we built one." Tom Watson, Founder, International Business Machines (IBM)
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