Vision: how leaders develop it, share it, and sustain it - includes related articles

Business Horizons, Sept-Oct, 1994 by Joseph V. Quigley

The Kotter and Heskett thesis is quantitatively supported and by no means simplistic. It stresses that a strong corporate culture alone is not enough; it must be combined with an appropriate business strategy for the industry. This strong and strategically appropriate culture must go hand in hand with a highly adaptive approach to change in the external world. A final and necessary ingredient is strong leadership at all levels of the organization, not just at the top.

References

Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).

Max DePree, Leadership Is an Art (New York: Free Press, 1990).

John W. Gardner, Excellence (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).

Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 197%.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

Lester B. Korn, "How the Next CEO Will Be Different," Fortune, May 22, 1989, p. 157.

John Kotter and James Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper Collins, 1982).

Vision versus Running the Business: A Contemporary Debate

R.J. Eaton. the newly appointed chairman of Chrysler, has said that inside Chrysler they don't use tile word "vision." They focus on quantifiable short-term results--things everyone can understand and count.

Louis Gerstner, chairman and CEO of IBM, has said that a vision is the last thing IBM needs right now. And William Gates, CEO of Microsoft, said he believed being a visionary is trivial.

Those are strong words. None of these CEOs seem to think the "vision thing" is very important. What they also seem to be saying is that the clay-to-day running of tih business is what is really important. And it is. But it is not enough.

There are some strong arguments on the other side of the vision debate that need to be heard. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., said that both William C. Durant and Henry Ford had unttsual vision and foresight. They gambled on the future of the automobile when fewer were sold in a year than are now made in a few days, and both men created lasting organizations.

More recently, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, said that leaders must articulate a vision and the rationale for it and find a mechanism to engage tile whole organization in achieving it.

Max DePree, former CEO of Herman Miller, the smallest company ever elected to Fortunds most admired companies, has written two best-selling books on general management. He asks, "How does the company connect with its history? Most important, perhaps, what is their vision of the future? Where are they going? What do they want to become?"

On a broader level, Korn/Ferry International asked 1,500 senior leaders from 20 different countries around the world to describe the key traits desirable for a CEO today and in the year 2000. The dominant personal behavior trait identified by 98 percent of the leaders was a "strong sense of vision."