As a journalist in the late-1990s, I wrote a number of articles about the exciting promise of a company called Teledesic. And then, in the early-2000s, Teledesic spun out of control until it flatlined.

In retrospect, it was a classic case of what we’ve come to call vision entropy, which happens when a founder’s or CEO’s ambitions fall apart in disorganized pieces. It is a condition that frustrates many leaders who want to build something that changes the way we live and work.

Here’s how it played out with Teledesic:

The project was the brainchild of Craig McCaw, an entrepreneur who in the nineties built one of the nation’s biggest cell phone networks. (It was later bought by AT&T.) He started working on Teledesic in 1994, brought in Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, and the two invested millions of their own money. So Teledesic started out with some serious mojo.

The vision was huge. As the consumer internet exploded into our lives in the nineties, Teledesic planned to put into orbit 840 satellites that could provide a wireless digital connection to 95% of the planet. The satellites would hand off signals to one another in space by laser beams. Users would put a dinner plate-size dish on a window sill and get high-speed internet.

Of course, if you’re reading this now, you’re probably realizing this is basically Starlink, Elon Musk’s highly successful satellite internet business. But back then, nothing like Teledesic had been tried, or maybe even conceived.

McCaw had the vision at a time when most people connected to the internet via dial-up modems. Cell networks could not yet carry data. Big swaths of the global population couldn’t even make a phone call. Yet McCaw believed he could make the internet available to everyone, everywhere.

But McCaw’s vision alone wasn’t enough. He ultimately failed to guide and drive all of the people and resources he needed to make Teledesic happen. Boeing and Motorola invested and joined the effort. A Saudi Prince put in $200 million. Lockheed Martin got involved. All had agendas that veered from McCaw’s. Before long, delays and design revisions angered contractors, who started to bail. The delays also meant that land-based access to the internet was getting better, making Teledesic seem less necessary. In 2000, one analyst, Andrew Cole of Renaissance Strategy, told me: “I bought into the dream many years ago, but the dream has passed its sell-by date.”

Teledesic shut down in 2002.

Vision Entropy: A Common Challenge

Now, admittedly Teledesic is a highly dramatic illustration of vision entropy. But in the decades since, I’ve watched founders with big and not-so-big visions become frustrated by the same thing.

The causes can be many, but one common thread seems to be an ability to express and evangelize the vision so powerfully that everyone involved believes in the same goal and aligns around the strategy to get there.

Some founders just can’t express their vision in a way that others embrace and get excited about. Technical founders are often brilliant at conceiving and building a breakthrough product but aren’t as good at converting the vision in their heads into language that guides and energizes the rest of the team. The result is that everyone on the team has their own interpretation of the vision, which in turn means they’re likely to work towards a different goal than the founder had in mind.

In other cases, the founders start a business with just themselves or maybe one or two others. It’s easy to just verbally discuss the vision and constantly nudge a small team to keep them aligned.

But once the company gets funding and some traction and the team grows in size, people come aboard who were not there at the beginning. They don’t have the vision implanted in their brains from constant exposure to the founders. Some come in with different ideas or agendas. Before long, if you assembled all the key players in a room and asked each to verbalize the vision, they’d all say something different. Once that kind of entropy starts, it’s hard to reverse. From what I saw covering Teledesic, I believe this happened to McCaw.

The Importance of Articulating Your Vision

There are ways to battle vision entropy. In our work with clients, we’ve come to realize that writing out a straightforward, crisp story of the vision is a powerful way to implant the vision in the existing team and indoctrinate newcomers so they stay aligned with the founders.

But, interestingly, the process of getting to the written-down vision is as important as having the finished document – if founders do it right. Doing it right means debating and writing the vision story WITH the key members of the leadership team, who preferably represent different parts of the business (like product development, marketing, human resources, operations, etc.).

By going through the exercise together, everyone buys into the finished narrative. They get excited about the shared vision because they feel they helped shape it. They’re less likely to second-guess the strategy the minute something goes a bit wrong or veer from the strategy to appease some customer. When the each member of the core teams goes back to their various teams, they all evangelizing the same message.

The story of the vision becomes like the musical score for an orchestra. Everyone plays the same symphony, even though each has only a small role in creating the whole. The main job of the conductor – i.e., the CEO – is to set and maintain the tempo and make sure the pieces are coming together as a whole.

Strategic Category Design and the POV

This is why, when we work with a company on strategic category design, we spend a lot of the time and effort on the process of getting to a story of the vision, which we call a point of view (or POV).

The process itself pushes the leadership team to make hard decisions about the details of the vision and how to get there. These are decisions about who the company is and how it wants to be seen by the outside world.

It’s also why the POV is our most important tangible outcome. The POV is the musical score. It’s the constitution of the company. Done well, it clearly lays out the problem the company needs to solve, how a solution should look (no matter who builds it), and why this company is the one best suited to solve this problem and create a new market category.

Give the POV to anyone – a new employee, a partner, a contractor, the board – and they will see what the founders want and need them to see. The POV becomes an alignment mechanism. It keeps the team on track, convinces those who are not on board with the story to leave, and pulls in new talent who believe in the vision.

If McCaw and Gates had been better at creating a strong POV, they might have stood a better chance of keeping all the partners in line, meeting deadlines and moving forward. And while Musk built Starlink at a different time with better and cheaper technology (and the advantage of owning a rocket company that could put satellites into orbit), he’s long been good at writing down a vision and strategy and evangelizing it. See his Tesla Master Plans.

Founders who feel like they are constantly battling vision entropy can find help in the strategic category design process. It’s useful to have outsiders like us run it, because of the points we discuss in our article about perception vs. perspective. But some leaders manage to run the process themselves.

Need help articulating your Point of View and avoiding vision entropy? We host free office hours sessions every week. You can book a time here.