Imagine That

The importance of innovation, vision, organization, and risk in your business

By Andrea Hill

When my children were very young, I encouraged them to have fantasies about themselves. They could tell me they were anything—astronaut, police officer, king, or a rutabaga—and I just went with it. By the time they became teenagers, though, I found myself tempering some of their wilder flights of identity imagination. For the not-wanting-to-practice clarinet player who claimed she was “already good enough,” I would play a little Richard Stoltzman. For the wanting-to-skip track practice child who claimed he was already as fast as he needed to be, we looked up the winning times of prior state meet winners.

I have the same impulse when I encounter business owners who refer to themselves as entrepreneurs. Just because one owns a business does not make them an entrepreneur. It’s common to use the terms interchangeably but it’s just not accurate.

To call oneself an entrepreneur requires the practice of innovation, organization, risk, and vision. You may think it strange that I referred to these things as practices, but that is what they become when used in this context.

The Practice of Innovation

Entrepreneurs are constantly innovating. It’s tempting to think about innovation in terms of product development, but that’s not the only area in which innovation is important. The most successful entrepreneurs imagine new products without limiting themselves to products they know how to produce. Then, they innovate their production capabilities in order to produce them. Next, they imagine new or better ways to communicate the new product to the market, and they invent new ways of locking in customers.

For an entrepreneur, the innovation process applies to everything in their business. Innovation is also repetitive; just because they came up with a great idea for a production improvement doesn’t mean they stick with it forever. The next time they imagine a new product, they also reimagine their production.

The Practice of Vision

Of course, all that innovation can be exhausting. Ask any entrepreneur what complaint they hear most often among their ranks and they’ll tell you it’s some version of, “But we just changed that X years ago!”

This is where vision comes in. It takes a strong vision to achieve any amount of success, and that vision is not for the entrepreneur alone. For vision to work, it must become clear and motivating to all the people who will work on the vision.

Having a vision isn’t just a glossy mo-tivational poster though. For vision to translate to others, it must be expressed in terms of expected outcomes, what you must do for your customers to achieve those outcomes, what you must excel at to keep the customers happy, and all the things you must learn and invest in to achieve those operational goals.

Effective entrepreneurs share the vi-sion, attach goals and objectives to it, monitor progress toward it, course correct as necessary, and communicate the reasons and benefits for the course corrections. Vision isn’t a noun, it’s a verb.

The Practice of Organization

All that visioning and innovation require structure. You probably can’t remember what you wore to work last Monday, so it would be foolish to assume that employees and suppliers will remember the elements of a vision. But successful entrepreneurs don’t rely on memory, they also practice organization. Organization means putting the right people in the right roles, ensuring the tasks associated with those roles are the tasks necessary to achieve the vision, creating KPIs that keep the organization on track with the goals, and hosting regular reviews of progress.

That may sound like a lot of work—and it is! But successful organization is a lot less work than trying to keep all the plates spinning in the air all by oneself.

The Practice of Risk

All businesses involve risk, but it’s the kind of risks one takes and the way those risks are taken that differentiates entrepreneurs from business owners.

Entrepreneurship is about taking risks that are extremely difficult to quantify. Taking a big business loan is a risk, but you can run the math on it and decide how big a risk it is. But jumping into a new market space, taking a risk on an untested product or opportunity, or committing to a new business model are the kinds of risks that entrepreneurs take.

I’m not suggesting that blind risk is desirable. All risks should be analyzed and calculated to the extent possible. But if you want to make really big wins, you have to take some risks that are hard to calculate, and most business owners don’t have the stomach for that. The final practice of entrepreneurship—taking risks—is also its final test. You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur if you never take a risky risk.

As business evolves faster than ever before, we see the need for new business models, marketing approaches, ways of organizing our businesses, and markets to approach. When you actively practice these four disciplines, you will make some mistakes, have a few false starts, and even lose some money. But you can also carve a new business path that allows you to do more than simply survive.

I hope you can imagine yourself an entrepreneur, and that you will attach to that imagination the study and practice of these elements. Imagine, articulate your vision, build organization to support it, then leap. That’s the kind of practice that turns work into pure joy.