If you examine the individuals, organizations, and movements that have achieved phenomenal success, you will note that success is realized by the work of hundreds or thousands of people. Yet the core of every phenomenal success is a Vision that can be traced back to one or two individuals. Think of Bill Gates and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Apple, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google. If you go back further through history, the trend continues.
So why do these organizations flourish while others crumble? The first reason is Vision.
Vision
So what is Vision? And why is it essential?
Vision is not ideas and strategies, though it is closely related to both. Ideas come and go. Some work. Some don’t. A single great idea can launch a business, but it won’t sustain its dominance. The same is true for strategies. Even great business plans need constant adjustment. If you keep doing the same thing for too long, you become irrelevant.
The best way to describe Vision is a philosophy or mental image that encompasses every aspect of an organization. It is a Cause, a Passion, an Ideal. Vision isn’t ideas, but it decides what ideas will be implemented and what will be discarded. Vision determines when to make an enormous shift in strategy.
In short, vision is the guiding light of an organization. Phenomenally successful organizations are able to function so well because every part (especially seemingly unrelated parts) falls in line with a central Vision.
A Vision can be isolated in one or two individuals because it cannot be entirely conveyed with words. Suppose Henry Ford had gone around telling everyone he was going to make an automobile for the everyday man. Would someone have stolen his idea? No. Even if they believed him (which most people didn’t) they wouldn’t have had his Vision of the Model T and everything it could do for the average person. They could have made a different inexpensive car, but it probably wouldn’t have worked.
A Vision is a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things. A true original vision is a rare thing, which explains why great success is so rare and so difficult to sustain. And as if it wasn’t hard enough, Vision alone is far from enough to succeed.
This brings us to the second essential component of phenomenal success: Communication.
Communication
Vision without Communication is merely a beautiful dream. Communication is what takes Vision out of a single person’s mind and spreads it to others. Employees don’t do their best work because they get paid well or get great benefits, they do it when they believe in something; when everyone is working together for the same cause. Communication recruits the best talent and attracts the best customers. It’s what makes a vision a reality.
So there you have it. Phenomenal success is simply creating a truly original vision and convincing the entire world you aren’t crazy. The hardest part is having enough confidence in your own vision to communicate it to other people.
If you have trouble creating an original vision, doing the best you can to be different and better than your competitors will likely be enough to earn you honor and distinction.
Do You Have a Vision?
I do. But the communication part still needs a lot of work. I look forward to sharing it with you in the not-too-distant future.
A vision is described as the future state you like to see yourself, your company or your blog in. As in reaching a performance according to a specific measure (turnover, productivity, customers, reach, etc) after 5 or 10 years. And you revise it yearly so that you always have one for the future. There doesn’t have to be anything innovative about the vision. Innovation within the (business) idea is what has the power to make the vision manifest itself.
A mission is described as the difference you, your company or your blog is aimed to make in the world, the society or yourself. So this is the mission that Ford set out to accomplish and not the vision. The vision was to build and run a company able to fulfill its mission (where serial production was the innovation).
As for communication, I think it’s more important to let people know the mission than the vision. They care more for how much good your service provides to its users than how well you perform for your own benefit (or blog or business, or whatever).
Again, I’m not being judgmental, just sharing my views over the issue.
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[...] them where they are today. By thinking very different they created a vision to their problems! John Wesley says it even better: Vision is not ideas and strategies, though it is closely related to both. [...]