“Vision without action is hallucination”

There are all those excuses about why it can’t be done when, in most cases, it’s really about fear of failure, which can almost always be mitigated by a sound plan, a lot of perseverance and a desire to challenge the status quo.

Someone once explained to me that, in simple terms, there are two types of fear.

Fear Type 1 is when you’re in the jungle and staring at a wild, hungry animal with no escape plan and you have every reason to be terrified.

Fear Type 2 is what’s going on in our heads and is about all about perceived rather than real danger.

In the business jungle, we rarely encounter Fear Type 1. So, what’s the excuse?

Time is our most precious commodity and there are time bandits everywhere trying to steal it. One of my favourite images to portray this is a poster for a travel firm. It was black and white, with a picture of an old couple in what looked like a nursing home with the caption underneath: “Do you remember the time we nearly went to Turkey?” Brilliant. There’s nothing like a compelling event, such as ageing, to spur you on!

So where am I headed with this? Now is not the time use the government and the economy as an excuse for delaying innovation. The best the government can do is put tax breaks in to encourage entrepreneurship – but when did we ever rely on them?

Rather than bemoaning the decline of UK plc, surely it is down to us, the UK’s SMEs, to celebrate entrepreneurship louder than ever before and to actively identify, inspire, encourage and, where possible, fund new ventures, which will sow the seeds for this country’s future economic growth?

If we don’t do it, who will?

Martin Leuw joined IRIS in 2001 and has grown it into a £120m-turnover software house with a market value of more than £500m. Read more here.

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