A visionary is defined as a person with unusual foresight and the ability to anticipate things before they happen. Whenever we are in a position of leadership, we carry the responsibility of being a visionary, whether we like it or not.
Smart Business is all about visionaries. In 1999, we hosted our first Innovation in Business Conference, which recognized leaders for their innovation and vision in business.
This year, the featured speaker at the conference is Jim McCann, the founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com. Jim started with one flower shop in New York in 1976, and by 1986, had acquired the 1-800-Flowers number and changed his company name to match the phone number. By 1999, the company went public and added the dot-com to the name. Today, Jim sells more than $700 million in flowers and gifts annually. He anticipated the demand for quality products that could be delivered anywhere in the country and made moves to put his business at the forefront of that trend. When buying shifted to online, he was once again ahead of the curve.
Jim and others like him have the uncanny knack of knowing which direction their industry is headed before everyone else. The Innovation in Business Conference has been a smashing success because people want to learn what it takes to acquire these skills and apply them at their own business.
Failing to be a visionary will put you out of business. If you don’t have a vision, it will be hard to retain your top people. With no clear goals, they’ll see the company as stagnant and move on to more promising positions.
In the end, it’s all about accountability. It doesn’t matter whether you are running a $50 million company or a $1 billion company. It’s about the morale of the people, whether your top performers are being rewarded and whether everyone understands your long-term vision.
As the visionary for your organization, you have to keep everyone working toward that end goal that you set. You have to put back into the business as much as you take out. There are too many companies where the CEO is living good but no one else is.
Being a visionary isn’t easy, but if you carefully define where you want to go and how you are going to get there, you’ll already be ahead of most of your competitors.
For more information about the 11th annual Innovation in Business Conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, please call (866) 582-7011 or e-mail Caroline Calfee Zerbey at [email protected].
