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Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere?
The Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

Robert Louis Stevenson had much the same sentiment as Alice, when he wrote: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. The attitudes they had in common would make Alice and Robert un-backable for most investors. They were both quite clearly into life-style, not outcome, and life-style delivers precious little that's of value for an investor. Investors like as much certainty as they can get, and clarity of objective comes high on the list. An agreed plan ranks pretty high, too.

Two things this week surfaced to challenge this thinking. Few can doubt that the Cloud is here to stay - it has such huge cost, efficiency and flexibility advantages that it's unignorable. The Cloud is a bit of a frontier town, though, as some researches this week highlighted. There's a sea of propositions of all sorts of flavours, companies of all shapes and sizes running flat out, and few clear structures or segments to hang your hat on. Great if you love a good journey and you're less bothered exactly where you end up!

The second pause for though came during one of my routine trawls through the quality end of business journalism. I found Jonathan Moules' article of June 20, in the FT webside: "A new revenue model can prove a pivotal moment" (click here) in which he examined the value for the entrepreneur of a 'pivotal moment' - when, like the move in basketball, you suddenly pivot and change direction. In a fast-paced world, and technology is certainly that, right now, it seems change and free-thinking is a fact of life.

Go at 100mph but all go in the same direction, please

This can easily be a self-serving argument, though, and one that hold dangers for the entrepreneur keen to succeed. In fact the dangers arise particularly in a changing and uncertain environment. Teams don't operate effectively without a clear and shared understanding of objectives and priorities. When you're trying to co-ordinate people in a team, trying to get teams to work together, it's vital that there are certainties for everyone to hook up to. Without this, it's really easy to end up with well meaning people working against one another. Lack of a shared objective breeds distrust, antagonism and demotivation.

You have to trust the guy on the flight deck

The investor has to have trust in the entrepreneur running the business; like the airline passenger, you hope the guy up front is still heading to the same place he announced at the start of the flight. Every traveller hopes the pilot is looking at his instruments and out of the window, and will have the presence of mind to make a judgement if a course correction is needed. You hope he'll be decisive and set a new course, if that's what's needed. Above all, you do hope he knows where he's going and isn't making it up as he goes.

There are always certainties

As I shall argue in a future blog, the wise entrepreneur anchors his business to three things: Stakeholder objectives, external trends, and competitive landscape. While trends and the competition may be changing, it's far less likely that the objectives of the stakeholders in the business will change with anything like the same frequency. This is the place to start. Only when these change, or market factors make it impossible to deliver the agreed business objectives, do you bring everyone in and go back to the whiteboard. You thrash out the new direction, work out how to get there, shake hands with your stakeholders and communicate the new priorities to your team.

The Cat was right

So it's where you are going next that matters, what you're working towards, and why. This may need to be re-examined and adjusted from time to time as circumstances change, but if you're going to achieve, you must have a sense of direction as well as enough energy and focus to get through today's to-do list.

(c) 2010, 2011 Peter G. Osborn