more than nine per cent. Of course the vision alone did not cause the turnaround – it was what they did, suggested, fuelled and guided by that vision. Vision guides action. Action changes the world in the direction of your vision.
There are no guarantees on the journey, however. Sometimes vision turns out to be a trick of the light, an illusion. What looked like a doorway turns out to be a dead end when you get close to it. Or the vision stands real and robust enough, but the leaders can’t find the way, their strategy was mistaken and unfortunately there was only one chance. Sears took it and made it work, Apple computers did neither. Never it seems, has a company with so much good will managed so consistently to lose its way. In the late 1980s, Apple was a market leader in the computer industry with nearly 20 per cent of the world market in computer sales. In 1997, with debts of over one and a half billion dollars, it was a company struggling to survive. It was crushed under the Microsoft juggernaut, but poor leadership put it under the iron wheels in the first place. In 1998, it began a sales campaign with the slogan of ‘Think different’ and everyone hoped that it would take its own advice.
A journey starts when you see a difference between where you are and where you want to be, or to put it another way, when you no longer want to be where you are. The worse the current situation, the more difficult the journey, but you can’t stay put either. This was the situation that faced both Sears and Apple, and many other companies face such a dilemma every year.
Unless you have a clear destination, you may walk in a circle and come back to where you started from, only this time it will be worse. To avoid these circular tours, you need to move towards something better and you need to change the thinking that brought you into that problem situation in the first place – you need to ‘think different’ in Apple’s engaging but ungrammatical phrase. For example, Sears thought of themselves primarily as a men’s shopping store, but market surveys were showing that a significant number of decisions to buy Sears merchandise were made by women. So they changed the marketing approach and started new lines in clothes and cosmetics. The Sears catalogue was a national institution, it had been published for over 100 years, surely it was worth keeping? No. It was losing 10 million dollars a year, so it was scrapped. And Apple? They were justifiably proud of their ‘insanely great’ technology, and consistently refused to license it to the rest of the computer industry. They also targeted the educational system as one of their primary markets, even though the results of this policy were regularly disappointing. They believed in a closed system and in keeping control of their technology, not realizing that influence and success in the new economy are based on connecting with others, so they can develop your ideas and make them even more valuable. In the knowledge field, the more people use your ideas, the more valuable they become. Apple succeeded all too well at keeping control of their ideas and thereby limiting their spread. The prize was hollow, because its value declined. Strategic decisions about what to license were being made by the engineers, who did not have the strategic vision to see where the market was heading. If ever there was a place to apply the saying ‘a leader sees where everyone else is going and gets in front of them’, this was it. Apple saw where everyone else was going and stayed put where they were, believing that others would have to come back to them. No one had to because they were on their own. They recapitulated the error of Sony in the 1980s with their videocassette technology called Betamax. It was generally seen to be superior to its rival VHS, but Betamax was a closed standard and VHS an open one. VHS became dominant in the industry and Betamax faded.
So, not only do you need a good road map when you lead or follow a vision, but you must also allow your experiences and observations to refine it as you go along, and you must be able to share it with others. A leader creates a vision with others, or shares their own with others, and inspires them. A shared vision takes shape.
While ‘a shared vision’ sounds rather grand, the vision itself can be as splendid or as modest as you like. It does, however, have to be achievable, worthwhile and inspiring, first for yourself, and if you want to be a leader, for others too. If it inspires you alone, then you are at best a visionary and at worst a crank or an eccentric.
How do you make your a vision practical and achievable? First it has to be elaborated, refined and made more specific. Consider the following questions:
What is important to us?
The values or guiding principles.
What do we want to accomplish?
The destination or ultimate purpose.
How do we want to accomplish it?
The important goals and capabilities needed to achieve the vision.
Objectives are measurable steps on the way to those goals, they are targets that you must meet to achieve the goals. Objectives need to be measurable, so you have to decide what to measure, how to measure and how accurately to measure. Tasks are the work you have to do to achieve these objectives.
So, a vision is not a detailed blueprint, it’s a direction, a combination of what you want and what you value. From this vision you naturally set your goals. Goals are dreams with deadlines.
From the goals come a number of measurable, smaller objectives.
Also, to achieve your purpose you will need certain qualities, and your values will guide the whole journey.
Vision
A vision answers significant questions, those that can only be answered by action:
What do I want to accomplish in my life?
What do I want to look back on having achieved?
If there were one great task I could accomplish immediately, as if by magic, what would it be?
What have I always wanted to do – that nagging thought that seems grandiose but will not go away?
What am I drawn towards doing?
These questions can give you the main purpose of your journey.
Leaders start with the vision that they think is achievable and worthwhile.
A fully elaborated and worked out and carefully worded vision is often called a ‘mission statement’. To refine the vision into a mission statement you have to ask some critical questions, whether you are developing an organizational mission or a personal one:
Where are we going?
How will we get there?
What do we need to succeed?
What are our guiding values?
What will we measure for success and how will we measure it?
How long will it take?
Once you believe your vision to be achievable and practical, once you have your road map, you need to share it. How do you do this? You can write it down, you can talk to others, but the most powerful way of all is to live it and the values it embodies. Action can express a vision much better than words. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist and poet, put it this way: ‘What you are doing speaks so loud I can’t hear what you say.’ People will always judge you first on what you do, then by what you say. Artists, designers and musicians all lead mainly by what they do.
To fully use your vision and share it with others you will at some point, however, have to find words that capture it in a clear and inspiring way. Inevitably the words will be less inspiring and your vision may lose force and be misunderstood. The world of pictures is evocative and lucid, the world of words is shadowy and full of double meanings. Sight takes in everything all at once,