is about taking those and developing them into something greater, more fulfilling and more influential. We all try to shape the future by striving to make our dreams real. The question is, what dreams are you making real right now and are they really worthwhile? If you are not making your dreams real, why not?
Think of the future like a dark cave – Aladdin’s cave. You wait, poised on the threshold. The cave goes back into the darkness, swallowing the shadows cast by the pool of light at the entrance. The atmosphere is full of possibilities; you hear stealthy sounds. You know both treasures and dangers exist here, but neither what nor where they are. Some objects in the cave are within easy reach and many people are content to stay at the entrance, happy with what they can take from the ante-room. But to find greater treasure you need to trust yourself to walk further into the cave.
There is no light switch here, only your ideas can provide the light to see further. You are the leader here. Perhaps there are others clustered by the entrance waiting to hear what you find, or create.
Aladdin’s cave
Your ideas burn brightly for an instant, like a flare, and just for a second you and the others glimpse the riches around you and some of the guardians that you will have to overcome later. The flare dies and you rub your eyes, but the image persists in your mind, the impression stays with you. You know what you want and you know the direction in which it lies.
The initial flaring light has died down and become a torch, not so bright, but light enough to navigate by. People join you from the doorway and together you make your way into the depths of the cave. They light their own torches from yours as they go. Soon you have much more light, you can see further. No wonder more people are attracted to your band – you have plenty of light and you know where you are going. You make more detailed maps, the cave becomes more familiar. And still you have that first bright image in your mind that you can rekindle when the journey becomes hard and you meet unforeseen obstacles and guardians.
The cave changes while you move, you create new challenges, new pitfalls and new shortcuts by your advance. Sometimes you have to light another flare. You may be drawn deep into the cave, through fantastic landscapes. You may travel to the end of cul-desacs, or be distracted by superficially attractive but worthless trinkets at the side of the road, or even discover places you want to stay, but whatever happens you are committed to the journey, to going forward. You do not go back.
The same process powers our vision of a better life or a more competitive business. A leader always leads somewhere, even when the journey is inspired by a desire to get out of trouble. For example, 1992 was a disastrous year for the American retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company. They made a net loss of nearly four billion dollars, most of it in merchandising, on sales of just over 50 billion dollars. Sears was turned around spectacularly the following year by Arthur Martinez, who was head of the merchandising group, and in 1995 became CEO of the whole company. Starting from a simple vision statement of what was called ‘the three Cs’ – ‘making Sears a compelling place to shop, a compelling place to work and a compelling place to invest’ – the company went from the net loss of four billion dollars to a net income of 752 million dollars the following year, a sales increase of more than nine per cent. Of course the vision alone did not cause the turnaround – it was what they did, suggested, fuelled and guided by that vision. Vision guides action. Action changes the world in the direction of your vision.
There are no guarantees on the journey, however. Sometimes vision turns out to be a trick of the light, an illusion. What looked like a doorway turns out to be a dead end when you get close to it. Or the vision stands real and robust enough, but the leaders can’t find the way, their strategy was mistaken and unfortunately there was only one chance. Sears took it and made it work, Apple computers did neither. Never it seems, has a company with so much good will managed so consistently to lose its way. In the late 1980s, Apple was a market leader in the computer industry with nearly 20 per cent of the world market in computer sales. In 1997, with debts of over one and a half billion dollars, it was a company struggling to survive. It was crushed under the Microsoft juggernaut, but poor leadership put it under the iron wheels in the first place. In 1998, it began a sales campaign with the slogan of ‘Think different’ and everyone hoped that it would take its own advice.
A journey starts when you see a difference between where you are and where you want to be, or to put it another way, when you no longer want to be where you are. The worse the current situation, the more difficult the journey, but you can’t stay put either. This was the situation that faced both Sears and Apple, and many other companies face such a dilemma every year.
Unless you have a clear destination, you may walk in a circle and come back to where you started from, only this time it will be worse. To avoid these circular tours, you need to move towards something better and you need to change the thinking that brought you into that problem situation in the first place – you need to ‘think different’ in Apple’s engaging but ungrammatical phrase. For example, Sears thought of themselves primarily as a men’s shopping store, but market surveys were showing that a significant number of decisions to buy Sears merchandise were made by women. So they changed the marketing approach and started new lines in clothes and cosmetics. The Sears catalogue was a national institution, it had been published for over 100 years, surely it was worth keeping? No. It was losing 10 million dollars a year, so it was scrapped. And Apple? They were justifiably proud of their ‘insanely great’ technology, and consistently refused to license it to the rest of the computer industry. They also targeted the educational system as one of their primary markets, even though the results of this policy were regularly disappointing. They believed in a closed system and in keeping control of their technology, not realizing that influence and success in the new economy are based on connecting with others, so they can develop your ideas and make them even more valuable. In the knowledge field, the more people use your ideas, the more valuable they become. Apple succeeded all too well at keeping control of their ideas and thereby limiting their spread. The prize was hollow, because its value declined. Strategic decisions about what to license were being made by the engineers, who did not have the strategic vision to see where the market was heading. If ever there was a place to apply the saying ‘a leader sees where everyone else is going and gets in front of them’, this was it. Apple saw where everyone else was going and stayed put where they were, believing that others would have to come back to them. No one had to because they were on their own. They recapitulated the error of Sony in the 1980s with their videocassette technology called Betamax. It was generally seen to be superior to its rival VHS, but Betamax was a closed standard and VHS an open one. VHS became dominant in the industry and Betamax faded.
So, not only do you need a good road map when you lead or follow a vision, but you must also allow your experiences and observations to refine it as you go along, and you must be able to share it with others. A leader creates a vision with others, or shares their own with others, and inspires them. A shared vision takes shape.
While ‘a shared vision’ sounds rather grand, the vision itself can be as splendid or as modest as you like. It does, however, have to be achievable, worthwhile and inspiring, first for yourself, and if you want to be a leader, for others too. If it inspires you alone, then you are at best a visionary and at worst a crank or an eccentric.
How do you make your a vision practical and achievable? First it has to be elaborated, refined and made more specific. Consider the following questions:
What is important to us?
The values or guiding principles.
