Impact

Ideally, you have focus on and a true sense of urgency around having impact. 

Ask.com’s Dictionary.com defines impact in a number of ways. The ones that resonate with me are:

(noun)

• the force exerted by a new idea, concept, technology, or ideology
• influence, effect

(verb)

• to have an impact or effect on; influence; alter

Having impact, to me, means causing change. And impact is measured by the scope of the change and its results, not by effort, time, and resource.

You can have great asymmetrical impact by doing something small, by sharing an idea with someone, sending them an insightful blog post or article, or pointing out some data.

You can also do a lot of work, gather a lot of data, perform great analysis, and lead to no change at all, have no impact.

As a venture capital fund that also provides operational support and strategic consulting services, OpenView Venture Partners is also trying to figure out a way to have positive impact on the expansion stage software companies in our investment portfolio.

We constantly challenge ourselves to cause some change at a portfolio company that helps do something more easily, more profitably, and grow along a path to becoming a large, successful company, and to do this as efficiently and non-intrusively as possible, so as to add to, rather than take away from, the senior management teams’ focus.