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Ambition is the term I use to describe the things you are trying to achieve. We could also say ‘goals’, the ‘why’, ‘aims’ or ‘milestones’. 

It used to surprise me how many people are fully engaged with their business or project without ever really digging deeply into the ambition behind it all. This can lead to many problems down the track. Here’s 5 reasons why that may be the case: 

1. Many roads lead nowhere

A significant problem is that if your goal is too fuzzy (as I have written about in more depth in a recent post), it may not be clear which roads lead towards or away from it. Instead, it tends to be the case that almost all roads ‘look’ as if they might lead where you want to go.

But, if you are doing something particularly challenging, it is likely that only a few such roads will actually lead to your goal and most of the others are actually closed off completely. 

For example, with a goal such as, “I want a multi-million pound business”, you need to think about whether that is 2 million, 20 million or 200 million? Far more roads will lead to 2 than 200. 

2. Insufficient motivation

The day will come when your business requires you to crawl - naked - over broken glass to get things done. Does this sound like fun to you? It sure doesn’t to me. 

And this is the point, entirely. While things are fun, everyone can be an entrepreneur. The question is, what you do when things are not fun? This often comes down to whether you really want the thing at the end.

I often meet people who have big goals that they don’t truly want. And by want, I mean in the sense that they will walk over broken glass to get them.

3. What does it do for you - really?

Related to my previous point, I have experienced that even people who know their goals and have the motivation, still don’t really know what achieving those goal will do for them.

I’ve sat with entrepreneurs who want a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars but don’t have a strong sense of connection to what that will do for them, personally. 

This is probably satisfying some deep ego-need but seems to me to be a flimsy thing to build a business upon. It risks doing all of that work - suffering all that suffering - only to realise you don’t want the thing you fought for.

That doesn’t necessarily make your ambition wrong, but want anyone I am working with to be happy with what their blood, sweat, and tears buys for them.

4. Unobtainium

‘Unobtainium’ is the stuff of sci-fi movies and represents any fabulous metal that does not (and perhaps cannot) really exist. And some goals are like that. They do not represent a possible/probable outcome for a given combination of opportunity and risk. The danger is that you take the risk and put in the effort only to, inevitably, come up short.

I suspect there is something psychologically comforting about these big unobtainable goals. Few people will criticise you for claiming you want to ‘build a billion dollar business’ (although they may roll their eyes a little) - it’s kind of what’s expected these days.

At the same time, nobody will be very surprised if you fail because you were shooting for the moon. And failing at something huge maybe seems more worthwhile.

I think it takes more guts to say you’re going to build a solid £150m pound business and lay out the concrete steps around how you’d do that.

5. Low-hanging fruit (or, it’s hard to find balance)

The flip-side of an overambitious goal is one that is not ambitious enough - that doesn’t actually motivate or inspire. This is often the result of casual thinking about goals and plunging into something without really nailing why you are doing it.

Simon Sinek has written very cogently on ‘starting with why’ and whether you read his book, watch his TED Talk, or follow one of the many people who also talks about this the point is that it is well worth establishing the right goals before you begin.

The right kind of ambition looks at the risk you are taking, the effort you will have to put in, and balances those with rewards that are obtainable and that you really care about.

Think of the worst thing you can think of. Ask yourself if you would endure that to get what you want. If the answer is no - think again. If the answer is yes - forge ahead. If the answer is maybe - you still need to tune risk and reward. And now - before you invest your effort - is the time to do that.

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Image via NASA (Unsplash.com)

I don’t think anyone would argue with the idea that goals are a critical aspect of running a successful business. Although, it’s often been my experience that peoples’ goals are either too fuzzy, too under-ambitious or too convoluted to really help them.  

In my work I tend to distinguish two main types of goal, and both kinds must be used for the desired impact:

1. Horizon goals - these represent our understanding of what ‘winning’ looks like. This might be an exit valuation, profitability of a business or a desired social impact, e.g. ‘1 million people have access to fresh drinking water.’

2. Proximate goals - these represent desirable waypoints on the journey to winning, that are more predictable and easily attainable than the horizon goal.

A classic example of a horizon goal is the May 25th 1961 announcement by U.S. President John F. Kennedy, that the U.S., “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Now, this was certainly a laudable ‘win’ for the U.S. in the space race, but I’m not entirely sure how James Webb - then head of NASA - was feeling. Although he had conceded that it should be possible, NASA had no plan. I would not be entirely surprised if a mild sense of panic accompanied this public pronouncement.

That’s another sign of a good horizon goal. You’d like it to come about but you feel a mild sense of fear about how challenging it appears. If you’re not a little panicked, the question might be, “Is this goal worthy enough?”

If Kennedy had said, “Okay NASA, speak to you in 8.5 years,” he might have been in for a rude surprise come July 20 1969. Maybe the goal would turn out to be impossible, or maybe much of that time would have been wasted chasing up blind alleys?

Landing a man on the moon and bringing him back alive was a massive undertaking. If you were James Webb sitting in your office on the day after that first announcement, where would you even start?

A proximate goal could have been, “Get a man to orbit the moon and come back alive.” This is a useful goal because, if we could do this, there is a more plausible chance we can achieve our horizon goal. Yet still, this could be seen as a major challenge (in fact, it would not be achieved until December 1968 - some 7 years after the original challenge was set).

A more proximate goal would be putting a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, which was achieved in Feb 20 1962. This is a useful proximate goal because, again, it is on the path to our ultimate goal but it was also somewhat understood how this would be achieved.

From all of this, we can see that proximate goals form an arc, over time, leading towards the horizon and, at the same time, a set of go/no-go checkpoints as to whether that horizon goal is achievable at all.

In most cases I think it makes sense to define proximate goals in terms of a month, a quarter, and a year, which creates a nice blend of the close at hand and mid-term. I’ve no objection to planning over a longer term, but we need to understand that things change so quickly that 3-5 year plans are often outdated before the ink is even dry.

When setting proximate goals, the closer the time frame, the better understood the goal should be in terms of our ability to execute on it. Meaning, do we understand how we will achieve the goal? And do we have the skills, tools, and resources required to achieve it?

Setting a goal we plan to achieve in a month’s time is highly likely to fail if we don’t know how it will be done, nor have the tools, resources or skills required on hand. 

This might suggest that our goal is too ambitious and should be broken down further. It might imply that our timeline is unreasonable and that our horizon goal needs to be moved out. It could be that we need to marshal new skills and resources to achieve it on time. In my experience, it’s better to know this as early as possible and adapt our plans, rather than realising after 8 years that we’re not going to the moon after all!

So, in order for a business to thrive, you need ambitious, meaningful, horizon goals that both challenge and motivate. And a series of proximate goals that guide you along the way or help you to understand when you need to change course.

“Shoot for the Moon; you might get there”, said Buzz Aldrin. Are you setting the right kind of goals to get to take you where you want to be? 

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Entrepreneurs often suffer sleepless nights. So, what leads them here?

In a report by Startup Genome, ‘Within 3 years, 92% of startups failed. Of those who failed 74%, failed due to premature scaling.’ It’s a little easier to understand those sleepless nights when you read stats like that.

I have observed five curses at work that when alone or combined, make life very difficult. The last is more specific to the software world but the rest are widely applicable.

1. Stress
2. Overconfidence
3. Poorly understood needs
4. Hidden assumptions
5. Failure to communicate

Stress

Being an entrepreneur means being in the business of searching for a viable business model, while your cash pile dwindles day-by-day. After death, and giving presentations, this is one of the most stressful things you attempt. And something we know about stressed people is that their judgement suffers. You may be too stressed and not even realise it.

Overconfidence

If you are the kind of person who, when you share your great idea and get shot down think, “Oh, yeah, right - maybe this won’t work”, then you don’t get in the room. By definition, entrepreneurs are the people who don’t listen when other people tell them their idea is stupid. Confidence is built in to an entrepreneur but you have to be careful not to take it too far. The challenge is that, no matter how smart you are, at some point you actually ARE going to be wrong. Confidence - good, overconfidence - bad.

Poorly Understood Needs

You think you understand your customer very well. But what you may not realise is that people are good at lying. Spectacularly good, actually. You proceed on your understanding of your users needs, only to discover (and usually after spending a shit-ton of money building a product), how wide of the mark you are. The result? You are left in a muddle, scrambling to adapt, losing time you really cannot afford to lose. 

Hidden Assumptions

We all make assumptions, sure - and there’s nothing inherently bad about this. But in my experience, the danger is that assumptions can harden into ‘facts’ really quickly if you don’t manage them aggressively. We should always be asking, “What evidence do we have for this assumption?” And, “If we’re wrong about it, how screwed are we?” David Bland’s Assumption Mapping tool is excellent for handling this.

Failure To Communicate

This is a problem particularly when building software. Typically, it’s very hard for non-technical entrepreneurs to communicate with the people building their product. They get too involved in the, ‘How and what’, when they should be focused on the, ‘Why and when’. Conversely, developers have no idea ‘Why’, so they cannot help with better ways of doing things and the product then suffers.

It may be that one of these is curses is affecting you. It may be a combination of a few. Do you know? And more pressingly, do you know what are you doing about it? 

Tell me… 

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What is navigation? According to Wikipedia, ‘Navigation, in a broader sense, can refer to any skill or study that involves the determination of position and direction.’

In its purest form, I work with business leaders to help them understand the position of their business, and make smarter, more effective decisions about what direction to go in. I am a navigator.

I wasn't always a navigator; it took one of my clients to show me that I am. Previously, I was confused: I'm not a coach, although I use coaching methods at times. I'm not a consultant, as I only have ready questions, not ready answers. I do mentor, but I'm not a mentor. I sometimes advise, but I'm not an advisor. You can imagine how confusing other people found all of this. Unable to determine a clear definition for my offering, I created the concept of the Art of Navigation.

Now, you might be asking yourself why a navigator is essential in business? The root of my answer to that is in the sorts of questions I think should pre-occupy the mind of an MD or a CEO:

Where are we going? Why are we going there? What's draws us there?
How are we going to get there? What will it take to succeed?
What challenges lie between us and our goals? Are we taking the best route?
What is the best vehicle for the journey? Do we have it? Could we?
Are we making progress? If not, why not? If so, why so?
Have we discovered somewhere better that we could go?

What all of these questions seem to have in common, is that they are about where we are and where we can go: position and direction. They are about navigating your potential business future.

A useful definition of strategy (from Max McKeown) that I find people engage with very quickly, is in the form of the following five questions:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be?
3. What has to change for us to get there?
4. How will we make this change?
5. How will we get and use feedback?

These questions lead us back to position and direction again, but with the added element of feedback; of observing whether we are taking the journey that we planned. To this end, navigation is about strategy, value proposition, business model, and what I call, 'forensic strategy' or 'measuring what we do'.

So, why might you need a navigator? I think anyone who is doing something challenging needs help. I created the Art of Navigation out of beautiful mistakes and hard-won learnings from over 15 years of my own and others’ entrepreneurial experiences. It is a holistic approach - a system - that helps a CEO or MD to steer their business in the right direction.

If you want someone very focused on the journey - how you will get there, the perspective to understand if it's the best journey for you, and feedback about whether you are on the right journey - then a navigator might be just what you need.

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My purpose in this article is to highlight two particular ways of thinking about progress/success that I have observed; one I will call "lottery" thinking and the other "compound interest" thinking. Adopting the "compound interest" mindset is one of the most important things you can do to help yourself.

The UK national lottery is, by any measure, very popular. As I write the lottery jackpot stands at £3.5m. A little research shows that roughly 45% of ticket purchase sales go into the prize fund. At £2 per ticket that equates to a little under 4 million tickets sold. That's a whole lot of people making a very small investment in the hope of getting a relatively enormous payout in return.

With odds of something like 45,057,474 to 1 your chances of winning the lottery jackpot are so small you are actually more likely to be hit by a falling meteorite, or struck by lightning, or possibly both at once! Yet millions of people carry on paying their £2 week-in, week-out. If you bought a ticket every week for a year that's £104. It doesn't sound like very much but what else could you do with that money? It's enough to buy half a dozen online courses and an armful of improving literature. What could you learn, or learn how to do, with those?

If you wanted to think of it as money you are investing in your future, which would be the better choice? Which would be the better choice over 5 years? Or 10 years? That so many people choose the lottery shows that "lottery thinking" or spend-small/win-big appeals to a powerful part of the human psyche.

If we now switch to thinking about the world of business, a realm in which it is more common to think about such decisions as investments in the future, what is the picture here? Sadly, businesses people do not seem to be immune to this kind of magical thinking either. I've met more than a few entrepreneurs and business owners who, when you get right down to it, are subconsciously playing a kind of lottery.

Indeed, I am guilty of having been one of them.

What it looks like is this: rather than doing the small - but boring, difficult, or painful - tasks over and over again; You would, rather, hope to find a "golden ticket" by which will success surely follow. It might be a deal, a customer, a partner, or a course. Like the lottery player you hope for a single small investment that will have an outsize payoff.

It's not hard to see how this kind of thinking comes about, the media loves to portray success as an overnight thing. This has been exacerbated by the rise of startup culture. The real story of the rocky road, lonely nights, and challenges overcome often is not presented, and as entrepreneurs we are often complicit in this. The casual reader could be forgiven for thinking the story begins with an investment banker and enormous IPO.

Everyone would like to become a success overnight. I've been guilty of this kind of thinking too. But for you and me it isn't going to happen this way.

I have worked with entrepreneurs in startups and small business for 17 years and the view I have formed from that experience is that success works more like the action of compound interest on a bank account. If you put a little money in a bank account compound interest will increase it but slowly, over time. But, if you continue making small deposits, this plus the action of compound interest will transform the sum out of all proportion.

If you applying this insight to business strategy, it suggests that you need to be very careful about what you do in your business, especially the things you do (or do not do) a lot of.

As I mentioned in a previous article I think it is important that strategy be measured across the short, medium, and long-term. In the short-term you should give particular emphasis to measuring behaviours whilst in the medium/long-term the emphasis should shift to outcomes.

Why do it this way?

Because, typically, you don't have much control over short-term outcomes. A good example is prospecting to create sales opportunities. While their approach can surely influence it, a sales person doesn't have control over whether any particular customer will take a call or meeting with them, let alone go on to make a sale.

If you measured a sales person's performance over a month based on how many calls or meetings they got then a relatively short run of bad luck could dominate the picture and you might label as "no good".

However, over a longer time-frame, outcomes should start to trend based on the types of behaviour they perform regularly, and how well they perform them. It might be wrong to apply a “no good” label for not getting a meeting in a month, but if after six months? Or a year?

After a year of poor performance we surely have to look at whether the right behaviours are being practiced day-to-day. Or, if they are, whether they are being practiced well. This relates back to my previous post about failure & learning; How do we distinguish behaviours that are working from those which are not?

To start with, the behaviours you measure should have an expectation that - applied conscientiously - they will build up to success. In most businesses, for example, prospecting is an example of such a behaviour. If you measure the performance of such a behaviour & the resultant outputs there are four possible outcomes:

1. behaviour consistently applied + output good => success

2. behaviour consistently applied + output bad => either the behaviour is being poorly executed and/or you've made a wrong assumption, adopting a behaviour that does not lead to success. An example of this might be cold calling if you wanted to sell to high-net worth individuals. No matter how diligently you make calls it is unlikely you're going to be successful selling this way.

3. behaviour inconsistently applied + output good => well you're still doing something right, or you got lucky. You should probably start A/B testing to see what is going on & consider not doing this behaviour any more.

4. behaviour inconsistently applied + output bad => maybe you should start by trying to apply it consistently?

It is in 2 & 4 that you have the biggest opportunity, if you are open to doing so, to learn from your mistakes and thereby profit from them. As I talked about in my previous article "Is failure the best teacher?" it's critical to do so.

When you start to take this viewpoint it leads you to think that everything is important and that making even small improvements in the right areas could have an outsized impact.

For example, in a business where prospecting is important, one additional prospect per day would yield 250 extra prospects a year. Let's say you convert 10% of prospects into clients and a client is worth £10,000/year to you. That's another £250,000 just by coming up with one more prospect each day. That could be difficult, possibly painful, but it could also be essential to building success you want.

Of course your numbers will be different to this example but I hope you can see the principle at work. Now, imagine there's a small change you could apply to every prospecting attempt that could raise your chance of winning a client from 10% to 11% what could that be worth? Or if you could raise the average value of a client from £10,000 to £11,000? Or more?

If you pay attention to the small things that you do every day; If you learn what works and what does not, modifying your behaviour accordingly, you will build up a catalogue of small actions that build success upon success until you become an unstoppable force!

That reminds me, I need to find another prospect today. How about you? Are you planning to win the lottery? And, if not, what behaviour should you be applying more consistently to build your own success?

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