Only Playing it Safe "Makes Sense" but it Doesn’t Get you Big Wins
Only playing it safe in business makes business sense but it doesn’t get you big wins. Big wins only come from taking big perceived risks.
I work with a lot of startups and big companies, and they both tend to take a very consistently safe approach to almost everything. The director of sales doesn’t want to promise too much, so he goes with something conservative; operations will promise slight efficiency gains that are pretty straightforward to hit; and finance will just crunch all the numbers and since everyone is probably bonused upon hitting their goals, keeping the goals on the conservative side tends to give a higher probability of getting a bonus.
If you already know you can achieve the goal, there’s little growth. You’ll grow linearly at best (which might be needed by the way).
But real and meaningful growth only comes from being on the line for a big vision. There’s that old Norman Vincent Peale quote, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” But what does that look like in business?
Founded by Elon Musk in 2002, SpaceX had the vision of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. A big vision.
But it wasn’t vision alone. Anyone can have a big dream, it’s what Musk did with it: he put $100M of his own money into SpaceX.
In fact, of the $180M Musk received from selling Paypal, he invested $100M into SpaceX, $60M into Tesla and $20M into SolarCity, leaving himself so much on the line that he had to borrow money for rent and still had to raise outside venture money to position his startups for success. If SpaceX failed it would have been all over for him; he was exactly on the line to deliver professionally and personally.
They’ve had some success, obviously. Even to the untrained eye. SpaceX's achievements are impressive and include (from Wikipedia):
The first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1 in 2008)
The first propulsive landing for an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2015)
The first reuse of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2017)
The first private company to send astronauts to the International Space Station (Dragon 2 in 2020).
In September 2016, Musk unveiled Starship— which is planned to be fully reusable, will be the largest rocket ever upon its debut and will be the first rocket capable of taking astronauts to Mars.
Big wins come from taking big risks, having something on the line. Committed business leaders (you) have this amazing ability to figure things out that “need” to be figured out. Even if it’s a little uncomfortable.
We all have big dreams, big visions. What’s yours and what are you putting on the line for it?