What does success mean to you?

We all want to be successful. The trick is knowing how to define what success means.

Is a business successful if it has strong growth and high sales? Or is it successful when it is a nice place to work and fulfils its core purpose?

If you are a business owner, should business success come at the price of personal happiness?

These issues are highly subjective and too often we only understand them after the event. If we run full tilt at what we think success should be, we may discover we have gone down the wrong path.

Visualising success is a vital step in planning. Once the whole team knows what success looks like, it helps them to:

• Contest issues and make decisions on an objective basis
• Identify opportunities that will benefit the business 
• More confidently analyse what is waste

Complete this sentence. "My business will be a success when we . . ." Will this inspire and excite your customers, your staff and your stake-holders?

Andrew Wylie, Director of Pandemonium Creative, strategic thinkers in marketing, sales and creative.

What's the purpose of your business?

One of the greatest risks for a business is to not understand why it really exists. Lack of understanding often leads to poor decisions, missed opportunities and even disaster.

This misunderstanding can be seen with Kodak. Consumers were buying memories – Kodak was selling film. As soon as a more efficient method became available, all the IP, infrastructure and experience Kodak had became worthless.

How could this happen? Kodak was a pioneer in digital technology yet, as Pete Pachal writes in Mashable Tech, “they squandered every opportunity they had, finally entering bankruptcy in 2012. They were simply not able to change.”