What if ?
What if Steve Jobs did not share his thoughts about how people want to use devices everywhere? What if Lou Ottens, the inventor of the Cassette Tape and the Compact Disc, did not share his thoughts about how people want to play music everywhere? These companies, Apple and Philips, would probably have never become the big world players they are today.
What are your thoughts ?
This blog is about you, not me or someone else. But about you. It is about inspiring you to think if you have a vision on a certain topic. Are you aware of a phenomenon, trend, or development, and what do you do with that awareness? Do you propagate that for the good of a community or a company?
Today’s worldwide topics waiting for a vision are freedom, poverty, health, peace, work, energy, and happiness. Topics of lesser importance may be traveling, music, sports, holidays, video, transport, communication, and relationships. But even on these topics, you may have your futuristic thoughts.
Important to note is that being a visionary and having a vision is not about making money. It is about having fun and enjoying every day you live doing what you want. Being busy exploring trends and developing a vision immediately sets you on a path to doing what you want more often.
What is a Leader's Vision ?
Do organizations have a vision? No. Do leaders have a vision? Yes. Stronger said: a vision defines a leader. Not all visionaries are leaders because they miss the ability to execute, for instance, the inventor. So often, in successful communities and companies, at least two people, the inventor, and the leader, share the same vision. In my opinion, the perfect leader is a community architect.
A vision should not contain business ambitions, business objectives, or goals. Leave that for the strategy. Clean up vision statements by removing these. You only want to have things that happen and for sure will happen in your vision statement. Here is a real problem for managers to write visions: whatever you ask a manager to write, he will write down objectives, goals, and actions and label them as you want.
A leader's vision is people-centric. A leader's vision is often about confronting yourself with really tough problems and solving them, not bypassing them but overcoming them with new alternatives. Without problems, people would never have any vision.
A leader's visions often contain coherent subtopics or trends within the main topic. For instance, if the main topic is work, a vision of work can be divided into sub-topics or trends such as flex work, mobile work, eWork, and labor.
A leader in a company could have a lot of knowledge or strong thoughts on these topics or trends and translate them into action or strategy. For instance, if the leader is convinced that people want to choose their working hours themselves but also want to be managed directly, enabling that option for his employees might lengthen the time they spend on their careers at his companies.
In a vision like that, many details of situations arise.
A leader's vision is detailed, contains situational sketches, and can be structured into trends that are sub-topics of the main topic.
So, now what ?
My question would be: what will you do in the next 10 minutes? Do you carry on with your life like you have been doing for years, or do you take a ten-minute break and think over what makes sense and how you can be a visionary on your topic? Maybe you can do some good for the community with it or even start a future worldwide company.
Either way, good luck doing it!
Further Reading
If you want to develop a vision in your organization, you may do this as part of strategic management. Read more about Enterprise Architecture as Strategy or an Example Vision here.