What Stops Companies From Adopting Good Visions?

Jul 15

Companies go into the world stating that their vision is to "Inspire the world, create the future" or other such vacuous gibberish. Why is that?

Having a clear and compelling vision is critical for any company, lest employees feel disengaged and management resort to micromanagement. Yet it is the case for very few companies: a recent study by PWC Strategy& showed that, across 540 participants, only 28% claimed to feel fully connected to the company’s purpose, while less than half could clearly see the value they created.

Source: PWC Strategy& study on the connection between strategic purpose and motivation

This much is also intuitively true: in the years that I’ve spent talking about vision, the statement that most companies’ visions are lacking has universally been greeted with enthusiastic nods. Employees will readily state that their company doesn’t have a clear goal, and, in most cases, leadership will at least agree that there is room for improvement.

And yet, time and again, efforts to improve a company’s vision result in a new vision statement that’s as bad as the previous one. I’ve seen real companies state their vision to be to “Provide the world’s best customer experience every day,” “Be the standard of excellence,” “Build a more protected world,” or “Build a better working world.” Do I need to spell out how meaningless these are?

Why is that? Well, to paraphrase Anna Karenina: visionary companies are all alike; every rudderless company is rudderless in its own way. I suspect there are infinite reasons for companies to fail to adopt a good vision, but in my experience, I have encountered five main ones that I’d like to unpack here. They are, by approximate order of importance:

Saying what you’ll do also means stating what you won’t
Bias for execution
Success
Your vision is wrong
It may not be possible

Let’s get into them.

1. Stating what you’ll do also means stating what you won’t

I believe this is the big reason I’ve seen most companies’ prospects of adopting an adequate vision damaged. Adopting a clear vision, especially after operating for some time without one, will force you to reconsider your business. You might need to retire some products, deprioritize some features, or drop some clients. Those are hard decisions to make; they go against every entrepreneurial instinct.

I’ve seen this countless times. A company has an existing user base; they need to agree on a vision to go forward, but every suggestion leads to the same objection: “Yes, but if we do this, it will mean that we will no longer be serving this segment of our users!”

I get it. This is hard. I’ve failed for the same reason in the past. But you must remember that if you are designing for everyone, you are designing for no one. No single product will thrill everyone. At best, you will have something that will be “meh” for all of its users instead of having a passionate core user base—and the passionate user base is where your growth and profits are.

Do you remember Justin.tv? Chances are you don’t; the company was dissolved in 2014. Justin.tv used to be a streaming platform that allowed people to stream… well, anything. It got reasonably successful in the early oughts but then decided on a pivot that seemed insane to many: they would no longer be a platform to stream anything but just for video games. Many baffled reactions to that decision revolved around the fact that, surely, streaming everything is better than streaming only one kind of thing!

Even if you don’t remember Justin.tv, you will likely know the company that emerged from that pivot: Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon for a cool $1b in 2014, as its predecessor was retired.

The founders of Justin.tv found it in themselves to make this very hard decision: to drop support for many, many of their users and focus on one particular area. That turned out to be the difference between a moderately successful (if very niche) company and a giant hit used by millions daily. As I have written in the past, there is lots of value to be made by not expanding your market, but narrowing it down.

2. Bias for execution

If you are a founder or a leader, chances are that you like to “get your hands dirty” and be in the weeds doing what it takes to make your company succeed and thrive. Taking time off to work on the vision may seem “unproductive.” After all, this is time that you will not be spending meeting clients, talking with engineers, or designing new features — surely that would be a waste! Especially since building a proper vision is a significant effort; it’s not something you’ll knock out in an hour or so.

In a company where I was consulting, a very smart and dedicated manager led a particular project. She lived and breathed for this product, investing way more energy than her leadership expected. So far, so good. However, she was an operator: uninterested in tackling the question of the long-term vision of her product until she was satisfied with having solved all day-to-day issues. But, of course, there is no end to day-to-day issues!

Not knowing the ultimate direction of the product meant that it was often difficult to pick the right path. This product stalled despite its popularity with customers — and tireless work by the in-house team! Resources that could have been invested in developing it were instead dedicated to solving minor administrative issues. The manager was ultimately removed in a process that caused great trauma and led to the loss of an extremely valuable employee, who just happened to be given the wrong task: vision when she would have excelled in strategy.

Remember the benefits of having a great vision: motivation, autonomy, focus, and overall productivity. If you decide to save the time it takes to nail down the vision to do some more “productive” work, you will be like the people too busy pushing a square-wheeled cart to switch to round wheels. You will have, day in and day out, the impression of doing actual, productive work, but your company’s productivity will suffer since no decisions taken by your staff will be sufficiently grounded.

So you should indeed stop for a while and do the vision thing: everyone will be happier and more productive afterward.

3. Success

It’s rare to see success cited as a negative, but early, organic success can lead to complacency. As Gian Carlo Bisone, the onetime vice president of North American marketing at Compaq said: “Growth is the worst deodorant. It hides a lot of things”. I guess he should have said, “The best deodorant,” but you get his point. Companies that chanced upon early success without having a clear vision face challenges. First of all, adopting a vision will require giving up on many areas of business (back to the first challenge: stating what you will do also means stating what you won’t.) But most importantly, a lack of vision may not seem a problem when you’re raking in cash.

That was Mark Zuckerberg’s assessment of Twitter: “It’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” But when you’re in a gold mine, it’s easy to oversee problems. This also affects established companies: Kodak famously failed to see the advent of digital cameras even as one of their engineers developed the first prototype; their film business was just too profitable to imagine displacing it. IBM failed to see personal computers because they had such a good business building mainframes.

In her book Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke introduces the concept of “resulting”: the tendency to judge our decisions solely by their outcomes. If things work out, we assume we made the right call; if they don’t, we believe we made a mistake. However, it’s crucial to recognize that success or failure can be influenced by chance. Even in the face of success, it’s essential to question our decision-making and strive for improvement. This is a challenging task, as Annie Duke points out:

When I was playing poker, I did my share of taking credit for winning and complaining about bad luck when I lost. […] Blaming the bulk of our bad outcomes on luck means we miss opportunities to examine our decisions to see where we can do better. Taking credit for the good stuff means we will often reinforce decisions that shouldn’t be reinforced and miss opportunities to see where we could have done better.¹

Addressing this issue is not a simple task and goes beyond the scope of this book. I highly recommend Thinking in Bets as a valuable resource if you’re looking to enhance your understanding in this area. For now, it’s important to remember that not all of your successes can be attributed solely to your skills or foresight. It’s a humbling thought, but luck may have played a part, and it’s not a constant companion.

4. Your vision is wrong

Wait, stop! Don’t close this tab; I know that your vision is great, and I didn’t mean to belittle it! When I say it’s wrong, I don’t mean it’s bad. But your vision is a bet on the future, and as Yogi Berra said: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Various reasons may prevent the future you envision from happening or reveal that your bet to capitalize on it isn’t actually feasible.

With such uncertainty, some choose not to adopt a vision they may have to discard. I argue that even if you need to pivot massively, having a vision is critical. And for this, let me tell you the story of one of the most awesome pivots I’ve heard of: that of WeGaw.

WeGaw is a small company; you would be forgiven for not having heard of it. It started as a hiking app and pivoted to become a data provider for hydropower producers.

Wait. What? Let’s back up and retrace the story of the company.

WeGaw’s founders started the company as a “hiking platform”: a one-stop-shop to plan your hiking holidays, which would recommend paths, let you book hotels along the way, and so on. Pretty quickly, they encountered a problem: people who had booked trips through the app would find unexpected amounts of snow blocking their paths, leaving them frustrated. Undeterred, the founders looked for a snow monitoring service they could integrate into their app and, not finding any, decided to build one themselves by analyzing satellite photographs. They were building this as a differentiator against their competition in the hiking market; nothing more, nothing less.

However, shortly after releasing their new product, they got unexpected calls. See, while hikers were getting aggravated due to their hiking outings being cut short by the snow, hydropower producers were missing their targets by tens of millions of dollars due to poor predictions of how much water they could count on throughout summer. Those companies wanted the same data WeGaw was gathering for their hiking app to help with their forecasting, and while there is some value in helping hikers find passable trails, there was much more in hydropower. Hence a pivot that, while it may sound insane at first, makes perfect sense when you know the history of the company.

However, the key takeaway is that if the founders hadn’t started working with passion and focus on their hiking app, they would never have uncovered what ended up being a much more promising market. It is no small feat to build a pipeline to ingest thousands upon thousands of satellite images and the specialized software to analyze them to assess snow cover. It’s not something you do on a whim over a hackathon, but a work that requires the concerted effort of specialists over months. You don’t do that if you don’t know why you’re doing it. WeGaw needed their vision for a unique hiking app to stir them to motion, and this work wasn’t in vain: they ended up building a very successful business, albeit not the one they had set out to create.

5. It may not be possible

When laying out a bold, ambitious, long-term vision, you may not know how you will actually get there. It might even be impossible! This is especially problematic for engineers, who will reflexively try to point to issues and challenges. That shouldn’t stop you, though.

The vision is your north star, your guiding light. It wouldn’t be much of a north star if it were immediately evident how to get there; that would make it a mere milestone on the path to something bigger. So the question for the vision shouldn’t be: “Is it feasible?” but rather, “Would it be valuable for the world if our vision came true?” If you answer the latter positively, you know that it would be valuable to pursue it. Should you find out that getting to it is impossible, you will still have learned something valuable and probably developed new insights that will allow you to refocus in a different direction.

A fine line has to be drawn between what you don’t yet know how to do, and what is impossible. I’m reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to my daughter, a book that was written before any practical submarine existed. Jules Verne didn’t know how one such vehicle could be built, and his descriptions of the Nautilus left lots to be desired. But building that device was conceivable at the time, and, most importantly, the picture painted by the book was inspiring and contributed to motivating thousands of engineers to work hard to make it a reality. This is a great vision.

On the other hand, if your idea is to build a teleporter, I’m afraid you will have to reconsider. There is no doubt that billions of dollars would be yours for your invention, but unfortunately, such a device is not, in fact, conceivable with the current state of knowledge.

Wrapping up

Creating a good vision is not easy, nor is implementing it, and along the way, you will face lots of temptation not to bother and just go with the flow. You will have decent-sounding arguments as to why you shouldn’t clarify your vision: the clients you’ll lose, the time you’ll waste, the fact that it may not even be possible, and besides, look at the money we’re making right now, surely this means that we’re fine?

Keep in mind the benefits of having a good vision. It isn’t an accessory you can tack on to a company as a charm; it isn’t a nice-to-have: it is a force that will boost your productivity and the happiness of your employees. Getting there is hard, yes, but it is worth it. You can do it!

¹ Duke, Annie. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, 2018.