Chapter Twenty-Three
Finding the Right Vision

Burt Nanus

Do not worry about holding high position; worry rather about playing your proper role.

—Confucius

When I was serving as director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Futures Research, I was visited by a senior executive of a fast-growing food manufacturing company. He was concerned about the future of his company. “Are your sales or profits declining?” I asked. “On the contrary,” he replied, “they’ve never been better.” “Do you have a problem with marketing or product obsolescence?” I suggested. “No, our product position just seems to be getting stronger each year.” “Well, then, are you worried about keeping your technological edge or finding good workers or meeting a challenge from foreign competition?” I wondered. “Not at all,” he said, “we’re the best in our industry.”

“Look here,” I finally said with some exasperation, “just what is it that’s bothering you?” “Well,” he explained, “that’s just it. Everything is going so well that I’m getting uneasy. Maybe we’ve just been lucky until now. Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe there’s something just over the horizon that will clobber us. Besides, when things were tough, I was so busy managing crises that I never had time to think about the future. I used to believe that if everything’s going well, leave it alone, or as the old adage says, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Now I know that’s wrong. The best time to try something new, to take risks, to move off in a different direction is in good times, not bad. Isn’t that what leadership is all about—fixing things that aren’t broken?”

Of course, he was right on the mark. The cause of my visitor’s concern soon became clear. As a leader, he sensed he might have to provide a new direction for his organization. The old vision, the one originally provided by the founder of the company, had been spectacularly correct and brought the firm to its current high level of success. But the world was changing, and my visitor wondered whether the original vision would still provide the right direction over the next decade. He was concerned, properly so, with the question “what’s next, and why?” He was starting the search for a new vision.

His concern was anything but frivolous. Progress in organizations, like all human progress, is driven by the idealism and optimism captured in a persuasive and appealing vision of the future. In fact, Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, found this to be a universal human trait, as true for primitive tribes, nomads, and subsistence farmers as for the most industrialized communities in the world. In her own eloquent words: “From comparative materials, it seems quite clear that the utopias men live by are of vital importance in such mundane matters as whether they will struggle to preserve the identity of their society, their class, their religion, or their vocation; whether they will plant trees which take two lifetimes to mature; whether they will take thought to stop the forests from being depleted, the good soil from being washed into the sea, or the gene pool from becoming exposed to too much radiation” (Mead, 1971, p. 44).

But not just any vision will do. Strong leaders want to find that special vision that will shift their organizations into overdrive, that will speed things up in the right direction while conserving energy and power. To be effective, to truly inspire and motivate excellence and achievement in organizations, leaders must find the right vision from among the many good and bad possibilities always available. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some guidance in making that choice.

PROPERTIES OF A GOOD VISION

If your childhood was like mine, you dreaded the inevitable question from well-meaning friends and relatives: “and what do you want to be when you grow up?” How in the world were we supposed to know? When I was small, I didn’t even know what the possibilities were. Once I saw a firefighter on a big red truck and immediately that was what I wanted to be. The next week I’d want to be the cowboy I’d seen in a movie or a favorite teacher or a shortstop for the New York Yankees. As I grew older, the images proliferated. I thought about being a lawyer like my Uncle Leon, an astronaut, an architect, the governor of a state, a mathematician, or maybe president of a big company. The trouble was, I hadn’t the slightest idea what people really did in those jobs, and I knew there were many other careers I hadn’t even heard of.

Images are like that. They explode inside your head and can dazzle and overwhelm you with a collage of apparently limitless possibilities. But of course, most of us never seriously take any steps to become an astronaut or a professional athlete. Most of the images that appear in our brains are recognized as unrealistic, unattainable, uninformed, or undesirable. They soon lose their power to feed our fantasies or motivate our behaviors. They are not the right visions, the ones that we expect to make a difference in our lives.

So what are we looking for in a vision? To start with, we need to acknowledge that a vision is a mental model of a future state of a process, a group, or an organization. As such, it deals with a world that exists only in the imagination, a world built upon plausible speculations, fabricated from what we hope are reasonable assumptions about the future, and heavily influenced by our own judgments of what is possible and worthwhile. A vision portrays a fictitious world that cannot be observed or verified in advance and that, in fact, may never become reality. It is a world whose very existence requires an act of faith.

Does this seem too flimsy a fabric upon which to weave our tapestry of intentions? Would you, like many leaders, rather make decisions solely on the basis of history? Consider, then, that history itself is much like a vision—only facing backward. In its own way, history is also a mental model of questionable accuracy and frequent reformulation. After all, the events and people described by the historian no longer exist, and some, like King Arthur and Robin Hood, may never have existed. The mental construct we call history is nearly always based on secondary sources that are woefully fragmented and incomplete. The historian examines a mass of incomplete raw material, selects from among the supposed “facts” those that fit a particular interpretation of events, adds a healthy dose of speculation about all the things that may have happened for which no evidence exists, and tries to weave together a story that purports to tell not just what happened but also why it happened and what resulted.

If you still want to think of history as “reality” you have only to think of any recent public event now fading into history—say, the Kennedy assassination, the Watergate break-in, or the Iran-Contra affair. Despite the minute scrutiny of thousands of distinguished scholars, journalists, and jurists and hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony and interpretation, there are still large domains of uncertainty about exactly what happened in these events, why they occurred, and what their long-range consequences may be. And these were sensational, widely covered, intensely scrutinized events! What about the many developments that are not even noticed today, much less recorded, that will become part of the “factual” record only in retrospect, perhaps a hundred years from now, when historians try to reconstruct what happened in the late twentieth century as we have tried to understand the fall of Rome?

So it is clear that history, like vision, is also a mental model. For all its pretensions to reality, history is heavily conjectural, full of judgments and values, and frequently reflects the historian’s desire to influence today’s policies. And, as we’ve just discussed, even our knowledge of the present is necessarily incomplete.

Thus, we may well wonder whether these mental constructs—“history” and “current events”—are really that much more substantial bases on which to act than a plausible vision of the future. From the perspective of leadership, they are not, for compared with history or current events, a vision is a mental construct that we have within our power to transform into reality. In fact, a vision is the only form of mental model that people and organizations can bring into being through their commitment and actions, and therein lies its usefulness and its power.

A second property of all visions is that they are idealistic, what Margaret Mead called utopian. A vision has no power to inspire or energize people and no ability to set a new standard or attract commitment unless it offers a view of the future that is clearly and demonstrably better for the organization, for the people in the organization, and/or for the society within which the organization operates. Often the vision is something entirely new—not a variation on existing activities, not a copy of what some other organization is doing—but something genuinely new, an innovative departure that clearly represents progress and is a step forward. The vision, in short, must be manifestly desirable, a bold and worthy challenge for those who accept it.

So any vision is a mental model of a desirable or idealistic future for the organization. But beyond that, what about the better visions, those that have the ability to renew or transform an organization? Consider Toyota’s dream of producing a vehicle—later called the Lexus—engineered to go beyond the existing standards of high-performance luxury automobiles. Or consider Walt Disney’s vision, as he described it, for a new kind of amusement park:

The idea of Disneyland is a simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge. It will be a place for parents and children to spend pleasant times in one another’s company: a place for teachers and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education. Here the older generation can recapture the nostalgia of days gone by, and the younger generation can savor the challenge of the future. Here will be the wonders of Nature and Man for all to see and understand. Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world.

Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living acts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys and hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our own lives [Thomas, 1976, pp. 246–247].

Powerful and transforming visions like these tend to have special properties:

• They are appropriate for the organization and for the times. They fit in terms of the organization’s history, culture, and values, are consistent with the organization’s present situation, and provide a realistic and informed assessment of what is attainable in the future. This is not to suggest that the organization will not be changed by the vision. It almost certainly will be, perhaps quite radically. But if the vision is not appropriate for the organization, the time, cost, and pain of transformation may be so great as to make implementation of the vision all but impossible. In this case, a totally new organization might be a better choice, as IBM found when it decided to enter the personal computer business.
• They set standards of excellence and reflect high ideals. They depict the organization as a responsible community with a sense of integrity that strengthens and uplifts everyone in it.
• They clarify purpose and direction. They are persuasive and credible in defining what the organization wants to make happen and, therefore, what are legitimate aspirations for people in the organization. They provide agendas that create focus and hold out hope and promise of a better tomorrow.
• They inspire enthusiasm and encourage commitment. They widen the leader’s support base by reflecting the needs and aspirations of many stakeholders, transcending differences in race, age, gender, and other demographic characteristics, and drawing stakeholders into a community of concerns about the future of the organization.
• They are well articulated and easily understood. They are unambiguous enough to serve as a guide to strategy and action and to be internalized by those whose efforts are needed to turn the vision into reality.
• They reflect the uniqueness of the organization, its distinctive competence, what it stands for, and what it is able to achieve.
• They are ambitious. They represent undisputed progress and expand the organization’s horizons. Often, they call for sacrifice and emotional investment by followers, which are forthcoming because of the inherent attractiveness of the vision.

Visions that have these properties challenge and inspire people in the organization and help align their energies in a common direction. They prevent people from being overwhelmed by immediate problems because they help distinguish what is truly important from what is merely interesting. In a sense, these visions program the mind to selectively pay attention to the things that really matter.

Such visions also play a key role in designing the future by serving as the front end of a strategy formulation process. When Toyota articulated its Lexus vision—that is, to produce a new line of cars that exceeded the then-existing standards of high-performance luxury automobiles—it still needed a strategy for attaining the vision. The vision provided the direction, but the strategy provided the framework for getting there. Among other things, the strategy undoubtedly included objectives relating to the intended technical quality and performance of the car, some marketing and production goals, a reformulation of supplier and distribution arrangements, and carefully drawn financial projections.

A good strategy may be indispensable in coordinating management decisions and preparing for contingencies, but a strategy has cohesion and legitimacy only in the context of a clearly articulated and widely shared vision of the future. A strategy is only as good as the vision that guides it, which is why purpose and intentions tend to be more powerful than plans in directing organizational behavior. As Yogi Berra is reported to have said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.”

WHAT VISION IS NOT

You might conclude from the preceding section that a vision is some sort of magic elixir that cures all organizational ills. This is unfortunately not the case. For every Lexus, there may be a score of Edsels. No matter how well formulated, a vision can fail if it is inappropriate or if it is poorly communicated or implemented. Sometimes visions fail because they were overly ambitious or unrealistic from the start. Sometimes they are overtaken by events and become obsolete before they can be realized.

For a balanced view of what vision can and cannot accomplish, we must be clear on what vision is not:

• While a vision is about the future, it is not a prophecy (although after the fact it may seem so). If I say my vision is to become a great writer, I certainly am not predicting that I will become one, no matter how much my vision may shape my style of writing or my approach to a subject. Although there have been visions so powerful that those who first offered them seem in retrospect to be prophets—for example, Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of an independent India or Henry Ford’s vision of a car in every garage—these visions had power not because they were prophecies but because of the way they captured the imagination of others, mobilized resources, and reshaped the reality of their times.
• A vision is not a mission. To state that an organization has a mission is to state its purpose, not its direction. For example, the mission of a farmer hasn’t changed in thousands of years: it is to grow food and bring it to market at a price that pays for all the costs of production and provides an acceptable standard of living (or profit) for the farmer. However, one particular farmer might have a vision of passing on to his children a farm with twice the acreage he currently has, while another may dream about opening a canning operation on her property, and a third may aim to be a pioneer in growing organic vegetables.
• A vision is not factual. It doesn’t exist and may never be realized as originally imagined. It deals not with reality but with possible and desirable futures. It is full of speculation, assumptions, and value judgments. In organizations that depend heavily on the decision-making model of fact gathering, performance measurement, and verification, vision may seem to be an anachronism. But the absence of a factual basis for vision does not necessarily imply a lack of information or substance. Visions should be the well-informed results of systematic processes that ensure some degree of comprehensiveness and confidence.
• A vision cannot be true or false. It can be evaluated only relative to other possible directions for the organization. That is, it can be seen as better or worse, more or less rational, safer or riskier, more or less appropriate, or even just good enough.
• A vision is not static, enunciated once for all time. The unraveling of the Soviet Union is eloquent testimony to the dangers of staying with a vision—in this case, the Marxist-Leninist ideal—long after it has proven wrong and counterproductive. Rather, vision formulation should be seen as a dynamic process, an integral part of the ongoing task of visionary leadership. Part of the genius of the American system is an electoral process that forces the testing and redevelopment of a vision for the future of the nation every four years.
• A vision is not a constraint on actions, except for those inconsistent with the vision. Instead, it is designed to unleash and then orient the energies of the organization in a common direction, to open up opportunities rather than to restrict them, and to serve as a catalyst for the changes needed to ensure the long-term success of the venture.

Thus far, we have been discussing what vision is, what it is not, and how to tell the difference between good and bad visions. But where does a vision come from? Is it simply a dream born mysteriously in the mind of a leader, a rare stroke of genius, or can it be the result of a considered and systematic process?

WHERE VISION COMES FROM

My wife and I like to travel. Every so often, we’ll come to a building or a town square that quite literally stops us in our tracks. It might be a cathedral, an unusual house, or maybe a particularly beautiful park or public monument. As we gaze at the arresting sight, I always wonder, “How in the world did the architect or artist think of that?” After all, where there is now what seems such a perfectly natural and obvious part of the landscape was at one time just an empty lot full of weeds.

Every remarkable artistic achievement starts as nothing more than a dream, usually of one individual, and not infrequently contested and ridiculed by friends and colleagues. Such a dream is a vision not much different from one a leader develops for an organization, for leadership itself is also an art form. Visionary leaders, like artists, are astute and perhaps idiosyncratic observers and interpreters of the real world. Leaders, like artists, try to rearrange the materials at their disposal—that is, the people, processes, and structures of an organization—to create a new and more powerful order that will succeed and endure over time. And the best visionary leaders, like the best artists, are always seeking to communicate directly and viscerally a vision of the world that will resonate with the deepest meanings of people and cause them to embrace it as worthwhile and elevating.

Denise Shekerjian, in an excellent study of forty winners of the MacArthur “genius grants,” concluded that the great ideas of these artists, scientists, and social movers and shakers were born of a combination of instinct and judgment. She says: “What intuition provides is an inkling, an itch, a yearning, a mist of possibilities. What judgment provides is structure, assessment, form, purpose. Blend them together—and in the example of Robert Coles [Pulitzer Prize–winning author and child psychiatrist], season this marriage with a strong dose of moral imagination—and you will begin to recognize the tiny, pert buds of opportunity that, if pursued, may well lead to a dramatic flowering of the most creative work of your career” (1990, p. 170).

So where does a leader’s vision come from? Vision is composed of one part foresight, one part insight, plenty of imagination and judgment, and often, a healthy dose of chutzpah. It occurs to a well-informed open mind, a mind prepared by a lifetime of learning and experience, one sharply attuned to emerging trends and developments in the world outside of the organization. Creativity certainly plays an important part, but it is a creativity deeply rooted in the reality of the organization and its possibilities.

We mustn’t pretend that vision is always the result of an orderly process. It often entails a messy, introspective process difficult to explain even by the person who conceives the vision. Vision formation is not a task for those who shun complexity or who are uncomfortable with ambiguity. Still, there are some basic elements that are part of all attempts to formulate vision. Specifically, they are information, values, frameworks, and insight.

While vision is in a very real sense a dream, it is a special kind of dream built upon information and knowledge. The art of developing an effective vision starts with asking the right questions—and asking lots of them.

Values are the principles or standards that help people decide what is worthwhile or desirable. They are abstract ideas that embody notions of what truly matters, or should matter, in the performance of an organization and in the ways an organization satisfies its responsibilities to its constituencies—workers, customers, investors, and the rest of society.

Your values as a leader guide your selection of a vision in a variety of ways. Values influence the questions you ask about possible directions. They guide the choice of information you seek to answer the questions and how the information is evaluated. They determine which possible visions you consider, what criteria you use to select among them, and what measures of success you use to judge whether your organization is moving toward its vision.

Information and values are the raw materials within a structure or framework that allows you to see the big picture. One important part of that framework is your mental model of how your organization and its industry or peer group operates. Another part is a set of scenarios that captures your understanding of how the outside world may change in the future and what implications those changes may have for your organization.

It all comes together as a result of synthesis or insight. Sometimes a powerful intuition and drive in the hands of a strong leader are all that is needed. For example, the growth and shape of Southern California is often attributed to Harry Chandler and the Chandler family, who controlled the Los Angeles Times and were major landowners in the area. Chandler sensed what would work, decided what would be the best developmental path for Los Angeles and the region, and then simply made it happen. As Halberstam describes it: “They are Chandlers; their bustling prosperous region exists to an uncommon degree because they envisioned it that way. They did not so much foster the growth of Southern California as, more simply, invent it. . . . The city is horizontal instead of vertical because they were rich in land, and horizontal was good for them, good for real estate. There is a port because they dreamed of a port. . . .[Harry Chandler] was a dreamer, and he was always dreaming of the future of Los Angeles, of growth and profit; the commercial future of Los Angeles, tied as it was to the commercial future of Harry Chandler” (1979, p. 136).

Even here, however, one detects a considerable amount of calculation at work, the fruit of analysis and contemplation (if not blatant self-interest) rather than intuition or insight all alone. Intuition is a creative process still somewhat mysterious and poorly understood. However, intuition rarely stands alone and can be assisted by several structured methods.

Finally, the vision must be successfully implemented. As Warren Bennis and I said in an earlier work: “In the end, the leader may be the one who articulates the vision and gives it legitimacy, who expresses the vision in captivating rhetoric that fires the imagination and emotions of followers, who—through the vision—empowers others to make the decisions that get things done. But if the organization is to be successful, the image must grow out of the needs of the entire organization and must be ‘claimed’ or ‘owned’ by all the important actors” (1985, p. 109).

There are few things sadder for an organization than an exciting vision that is poorly implemented. Remington Rand, for example, entered the computer business more than forty years ago because it saw the revolutionary potential for such devices. For a short time, it virtually owned the world computer market, but it was a classic case of a great vision poorly implemented. Many years passed before Remington Rand’s executives fully accepted the new machine and committed the company to the technical support, marketing, service, and other functions necessary to make computers truly useful for customers. And by the time they did, IBM, which saw the vision much later than Remington Rand but implemented it much better, had obtained an unassailable market advantage.

GETTING STARTED

Let’s assume you are setting out to develop a new vision for your organization. Where do you start?

• Learn everything you can about your organization, similar organizations, and your industry. There is no substitute for being well informed on the strengths and vulnerabilities of your own group and on the challenges and opportunities in its environment.
• Bring your major constituencies (for example, customers, investors, the local community, the board of directors, unions, suppliers, and so on) into the visioning process, at first simply through informal conversations and later by soliciting formal suggestions. At a minimum, make sure you completely understand their expectations and needs and the dependence of your organization on their support.
• Keep a playful open mind as you explore the options for a new vision. The correct sense of direction for your organization may be obvious, but don’t bet on it! After all, everybody in the industry may be moving in a certain direction, but that doesn’t mean it is right for your organization. Indeed, that in itself may be sufficient reason to set off down another path.
• There is no need—and certainly no expectation—that your final choice of vision be your own original idea. Often some of the best ideas for new directions float up from the depths of the organization, but only if they are sought and welcomed when they arrive. Encourage inputs from all your colleagues and subordinates, involve them in the visioning process, and let them know how much you appreciate them all the way through.
• If you are new to the organization, don’t disparage the previous leadership or its vision. Everyone knows that you’ll be doing some things differently, and they will expect some changes in direction. Instead, show that you understand and appreciate the existing vision, praise your predecessors for bringing the organization to its current stage, and promise to move on, retaining the best of the past but taking full benefit of expected opportunities in the future.

Ultimately, no matter how much help you receive, no matter if the vision was first developed by others and merely adopted and embraced by you, your success as a visionary leader will be measured by the effectiveness of your vision in moving the organization forward. That is what leaders are paid for and, more important, why they are respected and followed.

Burt Nanus is professor of management emeritus at the University of Southern California and author of multiple books on leadership and management.

REFERENCES

Bennis, W. G., and Nanus, B. Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge. New York: HarperCollins, 1985.

Halberstam, D. The Powers That Be. New York: Dell, 1979.

Mead, M. “Towards More Vivid Utopias,” in G. Kateb (ed.), Utopia. New York: Atherton Press, 1971.

Shekerjian, D. Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born. New York: Viking, 1990.

Thomas, B. Walt Disney: An American Tradition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.