What makes great business leaders stand out? Connecting the dots. I learned this skill as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces.

Sales. Investor Relations. Accounting. Customers. Product. Bug fixing. ISO 27001 certification. HR. Finding partners. Communications. Trade shows.

As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, I am involved in most of these activities even though I have a capable team of 25 people. You might argue that it doesn’t make sense for a CEO to be involved in all those activities, but I am convinced it does. Why? Because somebody has to connect the dots.

Can you learn to connect the dots? Maybe not, then it might depend on the wiring of your brain. Maybe yes, then for me the answer would be that I learned it in the military.

I am an active reserve general staff officer, and it’s those guys who typically prepare operational plans and orders on behalf of senior commanders.

Planning the engagement of a brigade or division involves many different aspects — just like leading a company as an entrepreneur.

Here are some examples of how I apply connecting the dots in my daily grind as an entrepreneur.

Annual Targets

Ambitious targets can only be achieved when all the teams work together. At Yonder, we have designed the annual targets in a way that nobody can achieve their targets without the help of others. One for all, all for one. Ambitious revenues can only be achieved by the customer team when the sales team generates order intakes at least as ambitious. Happy customers require just as much a great product as they require a great customer team. And software engineering is not an end in itself, software is made for the market and for the customers.

Creative Solutions

Why are many large organizations considered boring? Because stuff gets done in isolated teams, if at all. Within a single team, you usually don’t have all the knowledge and skills that are required to solve a complex problem. Plus large organizations tend to suffer from organizational politics, where egos are more important than the collective.

Enter general staff officers. They are generalists, they don’t know anything. But they know that they don’t know anything. They only know about connecting different chunks of information, and about synthesizing solutions from these chunks of information.

That’s when creative solutions come into existence. Creativity is seldom created in isolation, but when different people with different skills interact: When a great people person without any IT knowledge talks to a die-hard software engineer who calls himself a caveman, for example.

Somebody has to orchestrate those different people, connecting the vastly different knowledge and skills without putting him- or herself on the center stage. That’s the general staff officer.

Zoom In, Zoom Out

It’s easy to be carried away by irrelevant details, and it’s also easy to forget the relevant details because you think you have to focus on the big picture.

Dwight Eisenhower paid detailed attention to the weather developments in the weeks and days before D-Day. Given the thousands of vessels that needed coordination on D-Day, paying detailed attention to the weather might look distracting and irrelevant. However, have you considered the tides, the moonshine, or the wind conditions for the fragile glider planes that were a key element in the operation?

It’s the same in business: Generating revenues and building a great product are the key objectives of any business. However, can you succeed without paying attention to currency fluctuations, business continuity processes, or building a network of local partners in that specific country in the Middle East where you are chasing an opportunity?

Zooming in and out is a key skill. It helps you ask critical questions and spot unrealistic assumptions.

Stay Humble

Last but not least, this is the most important point.

Sometimes, you work on a really big, flashy dot. And sometimes, you work on a tiny dot that is barely visible in the overall solution. Always remember that every dot is required to make up a great solution and that the tiny dots deserve quality work from quality people, too.