Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
— CARL JUNG
The value of a compelling insight to anyone other than the person who receives it is only apparent when that person begins to act and attracts the commitment of others. Then leadership can begin, and a vision can serve as the magnet that attracts commitment. Bill Strickland said about creating a vision, ‘‘The only reason I would even bother to do it is to get the support that I need to act on the insight. It isn’t good enough to sit and have it. I am in this world and we have to do something with these insights that applies to people living out their lives. I have to get it down to a level where they can get hold of it even though they do not have the benefit of the insight.’’
A vision is a mental picture of a desirable future. It may be stated as abstractly as Martin Luther King’s ‘‘dream’’ or as concretely as the construction of a new corporate headquarters. It may describe a definitive outcome or product, or it may depict an ideal ongoing process. Its seeds lie within the vital question a leader asks and the compelling insight the question produces. A vision begins to answer the many additional questions and issues raised by a provocative insight.
The value of a well-articulated vision was not always as obvious as it is today, when such diverse thinkers such as Howard Gardner, focusing on mind, Daniel Goleman, focusing on emotion, and Deepak Chopra, focusing on spirit, agree about the centrality of vision to leadership.
During the mid-1980s one executive asked, with more than a trace of arrogance in his voice, ‘‘Why should I tell anyone else what my vision is?’’ Such a question would not be asked today by any executive who attends to the literature of leadership or to how others lead. Vision became popular in the 1980s when leaders discovered that a worthwhile vision can provide purpose and focus to an organization’s activities. Suddenly it seemed that every organization had to have a ‘‘vision statement’’ and leaders, either singly or in leadership teams, rushed off to retreat centers to craft them. That inclination continues as leaders develop statements that, sadly, more often than not are soon forgotten by those who are expected to transform them into reality.
There are many reasons for these failures. At or near the top of the list of reasons is that many visions fail to win the kind of long-term commitment that they need; their inspiration lasting only for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months.