This isn’t a complicated concept. You simply need to be able to do, or deliver, something to the marketplace, for which you believe others will pay.

Yet even a simple idea can be rich in texture and implications.

Your business was established, at some point in time, to provide your offerings to people who want to buy it.

The business was structured in a way that let you produce your goods or services most efficiently. You presented and positioned your product(s) in a manner that reflected your business idea, in a way that you expected your customers to find compelling.

(Updating your business idea to incorporate current business realities is discussed in section 1).

Over time, if your idea works, you generally begin to draw other people into the enterprise. You may add additional offerings or variations on a product.

As the exchange between your business and the market becomes more complex, whether from increases in product volume and/or diversity, the more complex the business idea becomes.

The business idea often evolves unconsciously, without your realizing how complex it has become.

If, as it is in most companies, you have separated the business into functions, and hired people who brought a subject matter expertise to their roles, you have begun to fracture the organization’s understanding of the business idea. They will come to think of the idea from their functional point of view.

There will be a natural tendency on their parts to optimize the performance of their functions, while not thinking as often about the synergies, which can be obtained, by optimizing the interplay of the company’s entire panoply of resources.

The boss may function as the Keeper of the Big Picture, taking on the role of orchestrating the way different work groups, departments, and resources are applied toward the general theme of the business.

Individual workers, unless challenged to do so, seldom operate from the big picture perspective.

Even with a modest enterprise, it is true that no one is as smart as everyone.

Even if the boss is brilliant, his or her paradigms, assumptions and biases are limited to his or her own point of view. The boss can only be in one place at one time. No one knows what she or he doesn’t know.

So, unless everyone is drawn into the boss’s idea of the business, which ensures everyone works together to achieve a common purpose, efficiencies are lost.

Author’s Note: The word “conversation” is used frequently throughout this learning system. I mean something more than people engaged in idle chatter. Going back to the roots of the word, I am using conversation to refer to a broad interchange of ideas with another person or persons.

Today’s businesses are working to bridge the boundaries between and among people. One way in which they’re doing it is to institute conversations in the workplace about the business idea. Many people find it helpful to discuss complex ideas that they are trying to comprehend.

This may not be important for a superficial understanding, if that is all that’s desired. If all you need is for your people to repeat the idea by rote, don’t worry about it.

If each person makes their widgets at their workstation and puts them in a pile to ship, then they don’t need conversation. True collaboration requires something more than that.

If people are going to own the business idea as if it is their own; if they are to be flexible about problem solving, while staying in sync with the idea; if they are to collaborate with others in order to anticipate opportunities, then, conversations are essential.

Several conditions are necessary for these conversations to take root and to stay relevant rather than trite.

• The idea has to be well articulated.

• The idea needs to be spread in the form of a story that can be passed on by others.

• People talking about the priorities or decisions about the work, need to do so in the context of the business idea.

• People need to be safe to take risks, and explore their thoughts, within the spirit of the business idea. (It’s not realistic to encourage your people to feel safe to take risks; they truly need to be safe to explore ideas, without risking ridicule or censure if you disagree with them.)

• The idea needs to grow and evolve as conditions change over time.