| Leading Companies Online Magazine
Visions and Voices and Dreams, Oh My!
By Debra Sherman, Beyster Institure Staff
  We all need to be inspired. I was one night in June. I attended the Entrepreneur of the Year awards program in San Diego.
The stories of the finalists in this wonderful program were compelling. Each had demonstrated a remarkable capacity to overcome obstacles. Each had shown amazing innovation. Each had created high-performance company cultures. As the evening went on, I wondered about the common element among these talented and driven entrepreneurs. Then, Bruce Moeller the president and CEO of DriveCam, Inc. hit upon it in his remarks after winning one of the awards.
Bruce was a victim of road rage while driving in Southern California. As a response to this, he envisioned the need for a product that captured a driver's experiences and used them to improve driving safety. He came to San Diego from Kansas and said that he began to see visions and hear voices and have dreams about what a great company could be. Visions and voices and dreams, oh my!
As I listened to each award recipient, I began to realize that they all had seen visions, heard voices and had dreams.
A brilliant engineer, Walter Zable envisioned an amazing array of technological products. His company, Cubic Corporation, pioneered a range of technological contributions, from the development of the nation's first electronic scoreboard to the creation of the SECOR satellite surveying system to the production of a transmitter used in the Hubble telescope.
Gary Ridge heard the voices of his customers and his employees and reinvented WD-40 as its president and CEO. He diversified the product line and transformed the company from "a product fortress" to "a fortress of products."
At 17, Jamie Thomas left high school and his job at Burger King to pursue his dream of becoming a professional skateboarder. As his skateboard career soared, so did his company, Black Box, which manufactures skateboards and distributes a line of footwear.
What struck me about these entrepreneurs was not only what they said and heard and dreamed, but also how they helped people in their companies to see better, hear more distinctly and dream bigger. Maybe this is really the special talent that every great entrepreneur brings to his or her company - the ability to get their employees to see visions and hear voices and have dreams.
Bob Beyster was honored at the awards celebration. By sharing equity with his employees and thus making every employee an owner, he built a company of entrepreneurs in SAIC. His passion for employee ownership as a business strategy had all 43,000 employee owners at SAIC seeing visions and hearing voices and having dreams. That's why they stayed. That's why they grew a small start-up into a $7 billion-a-year enterprise.
The power of visions and voices and dreams, oh my!
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