Mostly, however, it is the future that has attracted man’s dreams, hopes, and fears. The future rather than the past is seen as holding the key to the riddle of his existence.
—FRED POLAK
I’ve been toying with the word vision for a long time. In two decades of work with arrived and aspiring leaders, from executive boardrooms to business school classrooms, I’ve noticed that the word instantly stirs up passionate debate. Debate about our company vision, debate about whether or not our leaders have one, debate on the current humdrum or unrealistic version that’s on the company website, and debate about whether it is of any real value at all to have a vision. I’ve heard everything from “Finally, we’re talking about what’s really important,” to “Oh please! Not another hazy discussion on that abstract notion that won’t help me deliver results.”
What I’ve learned from these debates is that the Vision Thing intrigues and frustrates at the same time. We look up to people and companies that seemed to have mastered it, but feel thwarted in achieving similar results. Most people agree that, when understood and practiced well, vision can be an extraordinarily powerful concept; a tool, in fact, that significantly bolsters your ability to influence. Highly respected scholars in the field of leadership even put vision at the center of it. Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik declared vision the hallmark of leadership,1 and when Warren Bennis studied leaders he noticed that “of all the characteristics that distinguished the individuals, the most pivotal was a concern with a guiding purpose, an overarching vision.”2
But when the idea of a vision isn’t framed properly, it quickly becomes muddy and fuzzy, incomplete and unproductive, and loses the interest of those you wish to engage. A proper understanding and agreement of terms around the concept of vision is therefore essential, so I’ll first clarify in this chapter what I do and don’t mean when using the term before we start improving your ability to make it work for you.
Above all, I want to make a clear distinction between the company vision and your personal vision. In contrast to most strategy textbooks that usually allude to company vision, we will focus on your personal vision throughout this work. My aim is to increase your personal visionary capacity and bring out what a powerful vision can do for your personal leadership— whether or not you are hierarchically in a senior position.
After all, vision is not an exclusive for those in top-ranked positions. I have seen many people lower down the ranks galvanize their teams with a highly motivating and inspiring future-oriented perspective. Those team members took energy from the personal vision of the one leader that was most relevant for them: their immediate boss. That energy did not depend on the company vision; it was the boss’s personalized version that made it work. It was the boss’s attitude to look ahead and go beyond the immediate reality of today that provided meaning and direction.
Admittedly, in a corporate context, it often does imply that your personal vision as a leader needs to reasonably align and live within the constraints of the company vision. But to me that’s in a way just an aside, just as your personal vision needs to live within ethical and legal boundaries. That’s not what this is about. Your compelling story has everything to do with igniting excitement in those people who look to you for leadership. Your personal imagination and inspiration is what counts for them. It’s your dedication and your authenticity that they are looking for; it’s about the story that you bring to them, and much less about what is stated on the corporate website.
I’m not implying that a company vision statement is not useful or desirable. Crisp, empowering company statements can be extraordinary useful. Microsoft’s original idea of “having a computer in every home running Microsoft software” is often rightfully cited as a showcase of excellent company vision statements. Less glamorous firms like Progressive Insurance have managed to arrive at a rich company vision statement. Progressive’s vision is “to reduce the human trauma associated with automobile accidents,” which has opened up new areas of servicing clients and outperforming peers by operating differently and offering “unusual” products and services. Or think of Ben and Jerry’s mission: “Making the best possible ice cream, in the nicest possible way.”
These are examples of very powerful company vision statements. Unfortunately, these great examples often seem to be the exception to the rule. With the rule being that in most companies the company vision is good stuff for the marketing department that—after lengthy debate—ends up pulling together a series of trendy buzzwords to dazzle the public. The statement usually lacks all the ingredients of a powerful vision—including something that inspires, such as unconventionality, meaning, and authenticity.
But all that is company vision terrain. The one I talk about throughout this book is your personal vision, the compelling future orientation you want to develop to ignite your followers. It is a leadership marker, something that reflects who you are as a leader and inspires others to enlist for action—regardless of whether that is three or 30,000 people.
Let’s explore some basic themes first, before we move to a more foundational perspective later on in this chapter.
A vision is future-oriented. That probably sounds quite self-evident. Yet there is quite a bit more to this obvious observation. Since it is about the future, which is intrinsically uncertain, it is predominantly a product of imagination. You might have some beliefs, hunches, and past patterns to support your ideas, but it remains an opinion that cannot be backed up with factual experiences, research, and other quantifiable data. That simple reality already explains why people find it so difficult to imaginatively look ahead, since we have mostly evolved in a business reality where facts and figures are deemed very important. So unlocking your imagination is an important aspect of developing your ability to anticipate.
A vision is therefore a particular form of opinion. It’s one that—when done right—evokes energy and inspiration. A well-developed vision stimulates our thinking and opens us up to new possibilities. This creativity aspect unleashes playfulness and curiosity, which produces positive energy. This makes it very different from opinions based purely on logic and reasoning, which quickly bog us down and impede our imagination.
Powerful visions have at least four fundamental purposes.
A vision provides guidance and direction about where an organization (or a country, a team, or any other group) is headed. In the traditional notion of strategy, the vision is the starting point. It helps everyone involved decide what to focus on, what horizon we aim for, what boundaries and constraints to be wary of, and subsequently how to set priorities, resolve conflicts, and overcome the inevitable challenges that arise as strategy rolls out.
Take, for example, the state of Dubai, which grew in just a few decades from a desert village into a glittering global financial hub and tourist destination. This development stemmed from the vision of one man, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Realizing that the region’s oil supply would one day run out, he transformed Dubai into a modern city that would be able to thrive in an oil-free future. The Sheikh’s book, aptly titled My Vision, provided explicit directions, which have been followed diligently since the early 1990s, for achieving a high growth rate. Focusing on excellence in service and industry, he oversaw the development of Dubai with a vision that was clear, direction setting, and left little room for misinterpretation.
Without doubt the Sheikh’s deep pockets of oil wealth have been instrumental in realizing this imagined future—it wasn’t his innovative capacity that got him to accumulate this wealth. And from our contemporary view on management, we can have reservations about aspects of the aristocratic leadership style of the region. But those objections aside, it is evident that his ability to look well into the future and develop a clear and unconventional direction for Dubai stands out in the region. Neighboring countries such as Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, which similarly accumulated tremendous wealth from their oil reserves, now look up to Dubai as they start to wake up to a reality in which their oil exports and income will begin to diminish in the foreseeable future. But they are twenty years behind Dubai, where the Sheikh saw this inevitable change much earlier and developed the emirate’s post-oil-era direction.
Therefore, a vision is the essential starting point from which to develop a strategic agenda that ensures you get where you want to be and helps you tackle any barriers that might come up in the process. “Strategic planning is worthless unless there is first a strategic vision,” the prominent futurist John Naisbitt once said.
A potent vision takes us beyond the obvious into the unknown and stretches the boundaries of what we conventionally think up to that point in time. President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech to a joint session of Congress, announcing the goal of “put[ting] a man on the moon by the end of the decade,” stretched the imagination of a nation. It became not only a source of patriotic pride, but also a driving force behind a tremendous amount of technological and educational innovation.
Admittedly, it was also fueled by Cold War tensions: The speech was delivered a month after the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs invasion as well as the Soviet Union’s achievement of manned space flight. After careful examination of their options, President Kennedy and a small group of high-ranking officials concluded that putting a man on the moon was the best way to beat the Soviets. But the challenge was a colossal one. Kennedy stressed, “No single space project . . . will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
It was a powerful long-term perspective that surpassed the obvious, stretching the imagination into unconventional territory without becoming absurd—otherwise it would have quickly lost its power.
In addition to stretching the imagination, a well-developed vision can provide new and previously “unseen” opportunities. Challenging our current way of thinking can help us break through existing paradigms to find fresh ways of working, thinking, and behaving. This is why unlocking your imagination, freeing yourself from the constraints of existing assumptions, beliefs, and dogmas, is vital to nurturing your visionary capacity. We’ll explore this subject more extensively in the next chapter, but let’s briefly look at the story of IKEA to illustrate the point.
Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s Swedish founder, became one of the wealthiest people of our time by building an empire on his vision that “design furniture should not only be accessible to the happy few.” He wanted to offer attractive, functional products in a low price range.
But this is where the vision ran into difficulties. It either had to overcome barriers—namely, the existing furniture industry model—or remain a dream. Kamprad needed to find a way to get to prices well below standard levels, breaking through the paradigms of traditional thinking (or, in this case, traditional ways of production, distribution, and sales). He challenged the entire model of the furniture industry by handing over the parts and assembly instructions to the end user. Kamprad created a highly efficient model that significantly cut back on production and distribution costs. IKEA’s philosophy, “You do a little, we do a little, together we save a lot,” succinctly captures the company’s focus on customer involvement and cost savings.
Experimentation, challenging conventions, and willingness to embrace failure—all are required to successfully toy with reality, as Kamprad did. Also, at IKEA the path from concept to industry leader wasn’t as smooth as it seems when the story gets retold decades later. The real story was one of trial and error, with some smart ideas and some crazy ones (“Manland,” an area of the store dubbed “daycare for dudes,” may be one of them). But fundamental to the journey was a recognition that the current belief system needed to be challenged in order to reach the “better future.” That’s what a powerful vision can provide.
Finally, a powerful vision provides something very few other leadership tools can: It has the potential to galvanize those you lead. A vision inspires people to put their best effort into the cause. It unites them around a shared purpose, gives meaning to the day job, and mobilizes them into action. Think of what Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, and Richard Branson accomplished with their visions.
And it’s not only these larger-than-life, charismatic leaders who benefit from a vision’s energizing power. It also works for people with names such as Peter Kapitein, Scott Brusaw, Chanda Kochhar, Jørn Utzon, Taïg Khris, and Malcolm McLean. You might not have heard of them, but you’ll meet them in this book. They are fairly “ordinary” people—probably much more like you and me—who also made the Vision Thing work for them by mobilizing people behind their endeavors and dreams, inspiring them with a direction-setting, imaginative, and often paradigm-breaking idea, and following through on them with passion and dedication.
In 1977, Abraham Zaleznik of Harvard Business School threw a rock in the pond of management theory with his article “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” and invigorated a vivid debate among academics around the theme of leadership. The field hasn’t been the same since. In his article, Zaleznik pointed out that management theory had missed half the picture thus far. The focus had been on rationality and control, with themes such as goals, organization structures, and resources. The view of the manager was that of a problem solver, succeeding through hard work, analytical abilities, and tough-mindedness. But “managerial leadership unfortunately does not necessarily ensure imagination, creativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the destinies of corporate enterprises,”3 he pointed out.
He brought forward avant-garde themes such as inspiration, integrity, emotional commitment, drives, and motivation; themes we now commonly associate with leadership and that seem so obvious once expressed. In realizing this kind of leadership, he underlined the importance of vision:
Where managers act to limit choices, leaders develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and open issues to new options. To be effective, leaders must project their ideas onto images that excite people and only then develop choices that give those images substance.4
That image is the vision. The four purposes of vision we just covered illustrate the key differences between leaders and managers once more. A manager’s role is a very important one (let’s not underestimate the inherent difficulties of being a good manager!), but it essentially boils down to keeping things on track. A leader’s role is fundamentally different. It’s about transformation, about motivating and inspiring people to move toward a new reality. Another eminent thinker we met before, John Kotter, continued the path broken open by Zaleznik. In his 1990 article “What Leaders Really Do,” Kotter stated: “What leaders really do is prepare the organization for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.”5 To achieve this organizational change, a leader must stretch the imagination, challenge the status quo, show a way forward, break through existing paradigms, energize and mobilize people to follow ... In other words, a leader needs all the elements a vision brings.
So how does a vision connect with contemporary views on leadership? The concept of leadership is a dynamic one, trending through strategic leadership, situational leadership, authentic leadership, charismatic leadership, team leadership, servant leadership, and vigilant leadership, to name a few. But ever since Zaleznik and Kotter paved the way for seeing leadership in the light of pressing for change, most attention in the arena of leadership research goes toward transformational leadership,6 emphasizing intrinsic motivation, follower development, inspiration, and empowerment—all elements that are closely aligned with contemporary thinking about success in a turbulent, increasingly uncertain, and complex world.
In his standard work, Leadership: Theory and Practice, Peter Northouse, a professor at Western Michigan University, defines transformational leadership as:
[T]he process whereby a person engages with others and creates a connection that raises the level of motivation and morality in both the leader and the follower. This type of leadership is attentive to the needs and motives of followers and tries to help followers reach their fullest potential.7
The concept of transformational leadership is very rich; it includes moral standards, role modeling, ethics, and other important concepts. But central to this view on leadership is the role of a compelling vision. According to Northouse:
The vision is a focal point for transformational leadership. It gives the leader and the organization a conceptual map for where the organization is headed; it gives meaning and clarifies the organization’s identity. Furthermore, the vision gives followers a sense of identity within the organizations and also a sense of self-efficacy.8
So again, as stated in the introduction, a vision is more than a nice-to-have. It’s not something we should get to once we have the luxury to think about it. It’s the cornerstone in contemporary thinking on leadership and a critical aspect for everyone aspiring to lead.
So far, I’ve relied on larger-than-life examples of leaders to demonstrate the points. While these leaders serve well as illustrations, since we all know them, they come with a risk of alienation. Visionary leadership isn’t just for charismatic, legendary heroes who seemingly stepped down from heaven to personally do God’s work on earth. It is just as useful to far less heroic and iconic people working in less glamorous roles under less obvious spotlights.
Take Peter Kapitein, an “ordinary” program manager at the Central Bank of the Netherlands. His story starts with a diagnosis of lymph node cancer in January 2005. With treatment, his cancer was brought under control, and he joined several other cancer patients and cycling fanatics to raise funds for cancer research. They started an event they call the Alpe d’HuZes, playfully morphing the name of the legendary French mountain Alpe d’Huez that is often the decisive leg in the Tour de France cycling race.
The Zes in the name means “six” in Dutch, because here’s what the event entails: Kapitein and his group decided to scale the famous mountain not once, but six times in one day. To put that in perspective: the Alpe d’Huez has twenty-one hairpin turns that need to be navigated while climbing 13.8 kilometers at an average gradient of 7.9 percent. It’s a serious climb with some daunting slopes that takes a professional cyclist about an hour to complete and a well-trained amateur about one and a half hours. That’s one and a half hours of straight uphill climbing. It’s bad enough to go up once. But Kapitein’s group decided to do it six times in one day!
The event ran for the first time in 2006 with Kapitein and a handful of friends and supporters. Today, it’s the largest cancer research fund-raising initiative in the Netherlands, with over 15,000 participants in 2012. From an original 400,000 euros raised in 2006, the Alpe d’HuZes now raises more than 20 million euros annually.
But despite its incredible success and glorious legacy, this community of cycling fanatics has faced—and continues to face—tragedy as well. Each year, several participants can no longer make the climb, losing or having lost their battle against cancer. One of them was Bas Mulder, an Alpe d’HuZes founder. He continued to participate despite the recurrence of his cancer, following his life’s motto to never give up. His perseverance and positivism became a source of great inspiration to many. In 2010, he lost his battle and passed away at age 24.
At his close friend’s funeral, Kapitein vowed to find out why cancer had spared him but not his friend Bas Mulder. He followed through on his promise by starting a new initiative, Inspire2Live (www.inspire2live.org), with the aim to bring together the world’s leading researchers and institutions to accelerate the fight against cancer.
Supported by his employer, he spent several months traveling and meeting with some of the world’s most renowned thought leaders on cancer treatment. On January 14, 2011, Kapitein hosted a conference called “Understanding Life” in Amsterdam. He invited all the people he had spoken with. On that day, eighty of the world’s leading cancer experts, including several Nobel Prize winners, showed up.
But wait a second. Why would these highly successful and sought-after thought leaders from around the globe show up at a conference arranged by a banking manager? If you’re among that selective breed of world-class doctors and researchers, you manage your time very carefully. There’s no shortage of conferences and events around the world that want you as a speaker or guest. You could attend one every day if you wanted to. And although Kapitein had learned a lot about cancer over the years and clearly knew his way around the field, he didn’t hold any significant academic credentials or remarkable research results—important factors for attracting top researchers to a conference. So why would they travel all the way to Amsterdam for his conference?
The answer is simple. Kapitein focused the invitation and discussion on one thing only: his vision that, by 2020, cancer would no longer be a deadly disease but a chronic one. Instead of seeking a cure, he sought ways to control it, much like what the medical community did with HIV two decades earlier. That’s what convinced them to join and compelled them to contribute.
The world’s leading scientists wholeheartedly embraced Kapitein’s recasting of Kennedy’s “man on the moon by the end of the decade” vision. They concluded the conference by declaring the vision feasible. It would neither be easy nor straightforward, and it might not apply to all types of cancer. But for the first time, the lack of cooperation and practice-sharing between the different cancer disciplines was addressed and discussed. A concerted effort between them would make it possible to significantly outperform the current pace of development. This was the story that mobilized them to go to Amsterdam and work toward this shared goal.
In this way, an “ordinary” person like Peter Kapitein—no larger-than-life leader—is getting the Vision Thing to work for him and making the adjective ordinary a misnomer. He provides direction, stretches the imagination, breaks through paradigms, and energizes and mobilizes a large group of people to join and work toward his vision.
So far, I’ve loosely described the components that constitute a vision, its four key purposes, and an idea of the power it could give you as a leader. Let’s now dig deeper and identify the specific core ingredients that combine to create great results on the vision front.
We’ve seen that there are always elements of guidance and direction setting: A vision shows us a future ideal to strive for. The element of direction setting is critical, because followers use it to guide the decisions they make, the initiatives they start, and the priorities they set. “Since the function of leadership is to produce change, setting the direction of that change is fundamental to leadership,”9 Harvard Business School’s John Kotter affirms.
But that’s only the rational, cerebral part; it needs something else, something more, to make it compelling and powerful. Followers need to feel something in order to really spark their enthusiasm. They need to be touched emotionally; they need to feel motivated and energized. When this emotional dimension comes together with the cognitive one, the inspirational level rises significantly. In Chapter 3—in the section titled Visionary Shoes—we’ll explore some research into the followers’ effect of a vision and discover that emotional engagement has even more impact on followers than the rational aspect does.
So how does this emotional layer become part of it? How can you make your future-oriented story touch your followers emotionally and reach their hearts rather than their heads? There are two elements that predominantly ignite this emotional factor:
• Unconventionality. Unconventionality triggers emotions such as curiosity, excitement, desire, optimism, and empowerment. President Kennedy’s vision is one example I’ve already cited. Steve Jobs was a master at making this connection, grasping every opportunity to tell his people that “at Apple we are revolutionizing the world.” Jobs consistently emphasized the unconventionality of whatever Apple was doing. Remember the “Think different” slogan? We also see this connection at play in Kamprad’s unconventional furniture model at IKEA and Kapitein’s unconventional view on the future of cancer research.
• Connection to a Noble Cause. This connection sparks emotions such as pride, belonging, willingness, passion, nobility, warmth, empathy, and trust. Just to be clear, the noble cause need not be something as hippy-ish and vague as peace on earth. “Revolutionizing the world at Apple” involves a noble cause: drastically improving the accessibility and usability of technology. Kamprad, while pursuing a less noble goal of making lots of money, hitched his vision to the unfairness that only the happy few could afford well-designed furniture.
At least one of these two emotional factors—unconventionality and noble cause—should be present in order to allow emotional attachment to a vision. Ideally, though, a vision should include both. Consider the case of Peter Kapitein: The idea of transforming cancer from a lethal to a chronic disease by 2020 is both unconventional and noble.
Are these elements of direction setting and emotional engagement the only key ingredients? Not quite. There is a third and final ingredient that’s of crucial importance when creating a powerful vision. Nearly 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle already described the art of persuasion, of getting people to follow a leader. In On Rhetoric (350 BCE) he wrote:
Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. [. . .] Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. [...] Secondly, persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. [ . . . ] Thirdly, persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.10
According to Aristotle, in order to persuade followers, a leader needs (in reverse order) convincing arguments, the emotions they elicit, and credibility. Today we refer to his threefold description as Logos, Pathos, and Ethos— the cornerstones for creating engagement.
Logos means that the message needs to make sense and not crumble under scrutiny. Followers must be able to understand the rationale of what you are trying to do. In Aristotle’s words, “persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or apparent truth by means of persuasive arguments.” If the argument isn’t logically consistent, it’s unlikely that followers will buy into it (or at least not with the intensity we’d like them to). Logos, in other words, aligns with the setting direction part of a vision: Followers need to understand clearly and coherently why you are taking them in a particular direction.
But that only covers the cognitive part. Without the help of a marketing department, Aristotle figured out that understanding alone would not suffice. Followers must be emotionally moved and touched by your words. In addition to a logically consistent argument, they need a more compelling reason to go the extra mile. As Aristotle wrote, “persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotion.” We refer to this quality as Pathos, which connects to the emotional engagement I spoke of. Think about the way unconventionality and a noble cause (ideally in combination) work to create a powerful vision: They allow for an emotional engagement that goes beyond the rational and make followers part of something more meaningful and enduring.
Aristotle’s third element has been missing from our discussion so far. It refers to the integrity or character of the speaker. Aristotle called this Ethos: “Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.” If your behavior and integrity do not fully align with your vision, if your followers cannot associate your words with your character and your actions, the words will be considered empty and meaningless. Leaders need to exemplify the vision in everything they do, to connect it to personal values, motives, and deeper emotions. It’s this famous walk the talk criterion that makes us trust or mistrust leaders. It is often also the first thing people look for when confronted with the leader’s vision toward a new reality: Is the leader willing to personally change accordingly, or are these just hollow phrases?
Does the triad of Logos, Ethos, Pathos sound familiar? Remember Peter Northouse’s definition of transformational leadership: “a conceptual map for where the organization is headed” (the Logos part of the vision), “it gives meaning and clarifies the organization’s identity” (closely associated with Ethos, which is about values, identity, and integrity), and “the vision gives followers a sense of identity within the organizations and also a sense of self-efficacy” (the Pathos part, which is about a feeling of belonging and pride).
How to integrate Logos, Ethos, and Pathos into your vision and leadership behavior will be the focus of Chapters 6, 7, and 8. Let’s leave them for now and focus on one final, essential piece to help us create a foundation for our understanding of the Vision Thing. For that, we will need to descend into the basement—or, actually, the graveyard.
By now, I hope you are convinced that a compelling vision commands unique leadership powers. Good. Now I’m going to put a damper on your enthusiasm for a minute, or at least inject some realism. Our subject has a flip side we can’t ignore.
Because of its ability to energize and mobilize, a vision can be highly effective in mobilizing in toxic and undesirable ways. It can persuade people to engage in fraudulent behavior, as we saw at Enron, the infamous energy giant that went belly-up in 2001. Only a year before its demise, Enron was rated the most innovative large company in the United States in Fortune magazine’s annual Most Admired Companies survey (for the sixth consecutive year). Enron stated on many occasions that it set out to revolutionize the U.S. energy market. Direction setting? Check. Unconventional? Check.
But that appealing goal also created a culture in which people became not only highly entrepreneurial, but also blind to fraud. They rationalized dubious business practices and justified nearly any action that would help them achieve their “lofty” goals. Extraordinary risk taking became commonplace for the senior leaders of Enron, whether in the boardroom or on team-building retreats. An obsession with increasingly extreme sports illustrated a culture that only rewarded those with the nerve to test their limits. The vision led to prison terms, the dissolution of one of the world’s top-five accounting firms, and the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time.
Moreover, dictators throughout history have had their visions. Stalin, Hitler, and Bin Laden all painted a picture of a “better” world, which— technically—could be considered unconventional and paradigm shifting. They demonstrated their ability to energize and mobilize large numbers of people and easily connected their ideas to causes that, in their distorted worldviews, were deemed noble.
These are just the most obvious examples of how a vision can do tremendous harm. They often come together with narcissistic leadership styles. As pointed out by psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby, narcissistic leadership thrives in a world of tremendous change, where visionary leadership is called for. “Productive narcissists understand the vision thing particularly well, because they are by nature people who see the big picture,”11 he says. “Narcissistic leaders are often skillful orators, and this is one of the talents that makes them so charismatic. Indeed, anyone who has seen narcissists perform can attest to their personal magnetism and their ability to stir enthusiasm among audiences.”12 So this style and the illusion of invulnerability that radiates from it, no matter how reassuring at moments of uncertainty, provide the perfect setup for toxic and tunneled versions of the aspired future.
But there is more to be concerned about—an even harder to catch “dark side” aspect. This happens when the vision isn’t in the spotlight, when it does its damage under cover and over time. In 1662, the French physicist and Roman Catholic priest Edme Mariotte discovered that every eye has a blind spot.13 At the point where the optic nerve exits the retina to the brain, there are no cells to detect light. So biologically, part of the field of vision is simply not observed. The brain makes up for it by filling in the gap, extrapolating from what it has perceived, and “guessing” what the missing information might be. For the brain, that guess becomes as much a fact as observed reality.
It can be the same for the Vision Thing. There are always things we don’t perceive—and that’s when two potentially dangerous things can happen. First, we might miss the signal altogether and get caught by our (metaphorical) blind spots. This is rooted in our psychology; we often don’t see what we don’t want to know. Worse, we are sometimes incentivized to ignore the signal, especially when our job, relationship with our boss, or mortgage payment depend on it. And this incentive works wonderfully well in having us ignore reality. (For a convincing read on this “quality” of incentives, check out Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics.)
Second, and equally as dangerous, our brain makes up for the missed signal—as with the biological blind spot—and fills the gap. We convince ourselves that we saw something we didn’t actually see. It might be that the “observed” signal never existed, or that we morphed something we did see into something we wish we had seen. Again, psychology helps to explain these phenomena, and we will review them more extensively throughout this book. The point is that they blur our perception. The fact that they’re so powerful and so easy to believe warrants us to be careful with what we base our conclusions on. That’s especially important when we are dealing with the future, when facts and figures are still missing and all we have are weak signals, beliefs, assumptions, and our imaginations.
The more responsibility you have in your leadership position, the more powerfully a vision can affect the future of your organization and your followers, the more conscious you must be of these imperfections. We should never underestimate the power of a vision—a power that can be used for good as well as for ill.
———
Starting in Chapter 3, I’ll focus on the how-tos of reaping the benefits while watching out for the inherent dangers. First, let’s explore a subject central to developing our ability to look ahead and better anticipate the future— the productive use of your imagination.