The Greatest Leaders Are Outstanding Visionaries
The greatest leaders in business are outstanding visionaries, they fully understand their position within the organisation and hire the right help to manage their weaknesses. This frees up time for them to look ahead, spot trends and market changes and plan for the storm that may be on the horizon.
Learn to identify what role you play in your business or career, are you the talent, the skilled performer, are the leader, the one who encourages and leads the team or are you the entrepreneur, the one with the ideas. By fully understanding your position within the business helps you to perform at your full potential and also helps you to anticipate what roles you need to fill in order to continue to be productive.
Anticipation is a vital skill and comes much easier once you fully understand your role, your abilities and how to effectively use them.
We see so many examples of companies that have failed to value the skill of anticipation, companies like Blockbuster who failed to see the long-term value of streaming online, a company whose revenues was well into the billions, who could have picked up Netflix for a snip for £60 million, but failed to anticipate the changes coming.
Even Yahoo suffered the blow of not being able to anticipate competition, market changes and as a result, lost majorly with Google. In 1998 Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million, in 2002 they realised their mistake and tried to buy Google for $3 Billion, and Google insisted they wanted $5 Billion and Yahoo again said no. This missed opportunity allowed Google to be crowned king of search and go onto reach a valuation close to a trillion dollars (I honestly don’t even know how many zeros are in a trillion)
In 2008 Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $40 Billion which Yahoo rejected and in 2016 went on to be acquired by Verizon for JUST $4.8 Billion. A huge lesson was learnt and again the lack of anticipation was at play.
The greatest leaders need to anticipate changes, shifts and be prepared. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was as near as perfect visionary as anyone we will ever know, he anticipated the needs of the market and executed perfectly, it’s also said they the iPad was developed before the iPhone, yet Steve Jobs knew the market wasn’t ready for the tablet phenomenon.
How can you anticipate your market, the changes, what’s happening next?
Don’t wait to react, create your own blue ocean, anticipate the need and find a way to move into the uncharted waters and lead the curve.
Want to own your space and anticipate what’s next, join me every month for my meet-up The JC Effect, find out more here.