With Barack Obama’s recent presidential inauguration, and references to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, in the media, I have been pondering ‘the vision thing’.
So many of the successful entrepreneurs I have met, or heard speak, have had a clear and powerful vision of the future of their business, invention or service.
For me, the entrepreneur with the clearest vision has been Jordan Kensington, founder of Invincible Media who I mentioned back in November 2007. He described in vivid detail how, when starting out he had a film running in his head showing people on the streets reading his magazine (his first product), and the kind of stories it contained. He explained how the power of his vision was so strong it drew people with the necessary finance, and expertise into his network and led to a successful business.
Gerard Burke in his Growing Business column from last November last year describes the concept in more detail. He gives the example of Karan Bilimoria and his Cobra Beer, who even when he was delivering his first cases of beer in a battered 2CV car, had a vision of Cobra as the first global Indian brand.