The art of building a successful company.

• Author: Villers, Philippe
• Position: Reprint from Directors & Boards, Fall 1985 - Putting In Place the Right Board for the 21st Century

THE ART of building a successful company -- in fact, the art of being an entrepreneur in the first place, at least in high technology -- is in having an unshakable faith based on inadequate evidence. The reason is actually quite apparent: If your strategy was so darn obvious, everybody else would do it and you wouldn't have a chance to be a leader. Yet this unshakable faith has to be matched by an open ear and a willingness to make changes in response to what you observe, because the chance of being completely right based on inadequate evidence is exactly what you think it would be.

For instance, in starting Computervision Corp., I believed that the use of computers in creating engineering drawings was going to sweep the world and become commercially attractive. That turned out to be correct. I also believed that the product could be delivered most economically by the infant (this was 1968) "computer-utility" field as it was called then; today, we call it commercial timesharing. That belief turned out to be decisively wrong -- because it was not reliable enough, was too expensive, and the remarkable progress in the following two years in the minicomputer field totally eclipsed that form of delivery. We switched in time, and today Computervision is a world leader in the field.

The ability to listen to the marketplace and adjust is one you can never afford to lose. Despite your unshakable conviction, you are probably wrong in at least one, if not more, important respects in your planning -- and if so, you can still survive. This brings up the power of "convergent iteration" Since your ability of finding exactly the right answer from day one is close to zero, convergent iteration is the ability to go down a track believing absolutely you are right, but still observing and making the necessary turns along the way which will develop into something really good.

Multiyear strategic planning is a necessity. This means finding a time and place at least once during the year to think through and revise your strategic planning. I come back to convergent iteration. Your guesses can be very far off as long as each year they are modified and gradually converge, and you act on your guesses in some reasonably intelligent way. If you perceive a need for a significantly different product next year in the marketplace and you have done nothing about it last year or the year before, you've already missed.

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