Bill Gates understood the implications of Moore's Law and subsequently envisioned a day in which there would be a computer on every desktop; Marc Andreessen appreciated the potential of the internet well before his browser made it accessible and usable by everyone; and Elon Musk recognized that advances in energy storage might one day make it possible for the mass production of high performance electric vehicles.

In a world where business success is increasingly determined by innovative breakthroughs -- where software allows companies to reach hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in milliseconds; where technological advances mean product creation and iteration happen at previously unseen rates -- one of the most valuable skills is the ability to understand where technology is headed and what's possible as a result. What made Wayne Gretzky great, as he once famously acknowledged, was the ability to skate to where the puck was going, not to where it had been. The same can be said of a visionary technologist.

Leadership is simply defined as the ability to inspire others to achieve shared objectives. Managers tell people what to do; leaders inspire them to do it.

To inspire, you'll need clarity of vision, the courage of your convictions, and the ability to effectively communicate both. This holds no matter the size or stage of your company: Start-ups need to inspire new recruits to join the team, VCs to invest, and existing employees to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds; more mature companies need to explain to new and existing talent why they'll be able to have disproportionate impact on already well established platforms, convince decision makers to take intelligent risks, and educate external constituencies, e.g. Wall Street, the press, etc., on where the company is heading next.

Regardless of where your business is in its life cycle or how successful it has been to date, you'll need the right leadership to ultimately realize its full potential. For more on leadership, visit our LinkedIn Learning course: The Three Pillars of Effective Leadership.

Every individual and every team, no matter how skilled, is eventually going to experience obstacles -- running out of funds, the inability to scale a key piece of technology, a shift in consumer sentiment, a new entrant in the competitive landscape, naysayers within the organization -- if it's worth doing, you will always find yourself hitting walls. With that in mind, the most valuable people we’ve worked with are the ones that use sheer force of will to go around those walls, climb over them, or just flat out knock them down.

There's a great scene from the film "Apollo 13" that embodies this approach. The movie depicts the real-life series of events in which NASA attempts to return the manned Apollo 13 spacecraft to Earth after experiencing a series of potentially catastrophic failures ("Houston, we have a problem"). Through sheer ingenuity and determination, all three astronauts eventually make it home safely. This clip captures the resourcefulness and determination that made it possible.