Ari on Business

Natural Law #1 – An inspiring, strategically sound vision leads the way to greatness (especially if you write it down!)

What’s a vision? As we define it here, it’s a picture of what success looks like at a particular point in the future. If you’re starting a business, I’d suggest that you pick a time at least three to five years in the future, and longer might be even better. Your vision will talk about what your business does, and why it’s special. How the people who work in the business feel about being part of it. How your business relates to its customers, and about how it fits into the community. It could even detail what you as owner will do, and how much money you want to make. To be effective the vision needs to inspire the people who will be doing the work. It also needs to be strategically sound—i.e., while your goals should be ambitious, you want them to be realistic, too. To that end, the vision should also have some key measurables so that everyone involved has some sense of what you’re aspiring to: “As big as we can be as fast as we can get there” is NOT a vision. To be effective the vision also needs to be in writing, so that you and your fellow travelers—business partners, employees, etc.—will be literally and figuratively on the same page.

Please note, too, that the vision is NOT a strategic plan—the plan is how you intend to get from where you are to the vision. But everyone has to be in agreement on where you’re going before you can start mapping out action steps for how to get there.

Twelve Natural Laws of Business:
There are organizational principles that consistently work and, in the big scheme of things, follow a natural order. We call these “Natural Laws of Business.” Our experience here is that the natural laws are applicable for any business regardless of size, scale, age or product offering. Exceptions exist, but I’ll say up front I wouldn’t recommend expending much energy trying to prove these rules to be wrong.