Most businesses don’t start out of some idea that is guaranteed to make money. That’s just not how things typically work.
Where the genesis of most businesses comes from is in a problem.
That means that the path to future growth starts with an idea about how you can more successfully solve a problem in a way that your competition can not.
This means that often you are walking a road that hasn’t be walked before.
We are talking about creation here.
Your vision comes out of the challenge you are working to overcome or the mission you set for yourself.
Google famously said that they wanted to organize all of the world’s data. That’s driven much of the work that they have done with their search engine, YouTube, and other services.
Steve Jobs used to talk about Apple’s products “making a contribution to the world.”
Me, I transform the way that my partners look at making money.
This feeds everything you do.
Vision.
It isn’t enough to say I can make money, you have to add something more to the situation to have a vision.
Your vision statement should be focused on the larger world and it should be about changing the way that people view themselves or the world around them.
If it isn’t, then that becomes a problem because innovation is defined by the way that you change people’s perceptions.
And, if you aren’t changing perceptions, you are likely a commodity.
If you are a commodity, you are running the race to the bottom.
The race to the bottom only has losers.