MISSING
THE VISION

Topics: Change; Complacency; Leadership; Opportunity; Success; Vision

References: Galatians 6:9–10; Hebrews 13:20–21

After my first year at Stanford Business School, I went to see Jim Levy, who was president of Activision, Inc., one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Activision made games for the Atari 2600 game system and was rolling in dough.

I wanted to work for Levy that summer, so I made a bold proposal: “Hey, you’ve got all this cash and all these smart marketers and programmers. Why not go into the computer game business? You can dominate the PC the way you dominate the Atari 2600.”

Looking back twenty-five years ago, that wasn’t such a bad idea. After all, the PC market was only an inch or two away from the market that Activision was already in. But Levy disagreed with my proposition and told me, “We’re in the cartridge business—and those machines use floppy disks. Forget it.”

Sometimes success robs us of the eyes to see opportunity.

—Seth Godin, “Gear Shops Are No Longer the Engine of Our Economy,” Fast Company (October 2000)