MARKETING MATTERSCEO JOURNAL
The Vision Thing P
lease help me make a point by participating in a brief thought experiment.
Imagine I am sitting opposite
you in your office and ask to visit the maintenance shop. Since I’ve never been in your office and have no idea how to get from there to anywhere, much less the maintenance shop, you’ll need to give me directions. Now, imagine you are mapping in your head the route from your office to the maintenance shop and thinking through how you will explain it to me. You’ll need to keep the explanation clear and simple so I am not confused (and lost), but not so simple that my intelligence is insulted and I cease to care about your explanation. You’ll also need to be sure to communicate in a way I’ll understand, which means figuring out whether you should draw me a map, explain how to get from point A to point B in words, or take me there yourself. Tis simple exercise illustrates one of the most fundamental and im- portant attributes of effective CEOs and managers in general: vision. Tis essential skill is required to visualize and describe a path from a starting point (your office) to a pre-determined destination (the maintenance shop). In the real world of management, vision is the ability to see beyond the moment and through the fog of battle that is our daily reality to what your employees need to be doing to accom- plish as yet unmet individual, depart- ment and company objectives. Vision in the business world is
more than just having an imagina- tion; it is the marriage of imagination and improvement. It is the ability to transform high level company goals into individual and team improve- ment objectives and projects. And it is the proactive ability to direct personal activities and those of your team and other colleagues toward pre-deter- mined improvement objectives. Vision is the ability to imagine and
visualize a desired future state and act to continuously move people toward
DAN MARCUS, TDC CONSULTING INC., AMHERST, WISCONSIN
it. Unfortunately, this essential man- agement skill has been given a bad rap, causing us to appreciate it less than we should. For example, consider the grief President George Bush Sr. took during his failed reelection campaign because of his comment about “the vision thing.” Consider also that many among us perceive “the vision thing” to be little more than unproductive navel contempla- tion, fit only for a framed list of platitudes and destined to molder on a dark, obscure wall. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Vision has great utility, and organi- zations undervalue it at their peril. In my view, vision is the essential starting point for highly effective management and the one skill which unifies the efforts of an entire organization toward a desired future state. Profit maximization, quantum improvement, or process improve- ment of any kind cannot be achieved without vision. Vision’s first imperative is to enable CEOs to create a vision statement for their company. In two succinct pages, vision statements define the products to be manufactured and the custom- ers to be served, set out competi- tive advantages and major strategic and functional directives, highlight important commitments and the ways in which business is to be conducted going forward, and describe the business’s current reality as well as its desired future state. In a well-crafted vision statement, CEOs and their top management teams have every- thing they need to identify high level business improvement objectives and define functional and departmental strategies to achieve them.
Vision is the
ability to imagine and visualize a desired future
state and act to continuously move people toward it.
Vision becomes an everyday, all- the-time business preoccupation as CEOs and managers collaborate with their reports to identify the individual and team micro-improvement work needed to obtain the macro-im- provement agenda represented in the vision statement and made real in functional strate- gies, organizational charts and job descriptions. Tis continuous micro- improvement work is best guided by a weekly projects and priorities (P&P) planning process, which cen- ters around one- hour conferences between managers and each of their direct reports. Te focal point of
the conference is the P&P plan. Tis one-page document is a simple list of prioritized personal improvement activities that the employee should be working on in addition to his or her regular job for continuous improve- ment along the lines suggested by the vision statement and his or her job description. An organization-wide web of P&P plans—all derived from the vision statement—creates a stream of directed improvement work that goes on continuously at the micro level and ultimately combines to change the culture, achieve competitive advantage, and drive quantum improvement. Indeed, such work is the engine of profit maximization, and there is no more important facet of the manager’s job than keeping his or her part of that engine running at full speed. And that statement is equally true for all managers, from the maintenance manager to the CEO.
Keep the conversation going. Reach the author at
tdcmetal@wi-net.com to comment on this or any CEO Journal column or to suggest future topics.
August 2012 MODERN CASTING | 45
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