Ditch Your Mission Statement IMMEDIATELY, Use This Instead!

What do you see right now? Really? What do you see? Most likely, you see me standing up here, the screens on either side of me.

You see the people in front of.

You and off to the side of you, plus you see the stuff on the tables. Each of you, however, sees what you see a little differently. Because of where you're sitting, how good your eyesight is, and how tall you are, what you see can vary greatly. You need everyone on your team to see the vision you see for your company. Imagine if everyone you worked with could read your mind. They could see as clearly as you see where you want your business to be going and how you want it operating. This is what Cameron Herald specializes in, helping business owners create a vivid vision. He's done this many times over the past 25 years. First by helping to build $200 million plus businesses, and now by coaching CEOs and CEOs on how they can get everyone on their team to see their vivid vision. Cameron is known around the world as the business growth guru, and his COO alliance is helping dozens of companies grow their business. Every time Cameron speaks, we can learn something. Today you're going to learn about a vivid vision.

I wanted to share this concept with you because it's been really foundational in not only the companies that I've helped build, but in the companies that I've been coaching, but also in my business as well. And I had a bit of an epiphany moment recently with my own company that for the last nine years, I've been coaching CEOs working behind the scenes, trying to teach the CEO all the systems they needed to run their business, only to realize that at the end of the day, it's not the CEO that's ever putting any of those systems in place. You're kind of teaching the wrong guy. In fact, most of the groups around the world are teaching the wrong guy, because we're supposed to be teaching you what you need to know, but not how to do it. So we created the COO alliance to teach people how to do it. This system, however, is the one thing that you need to do in your company. It's really the only thing that you need to do the rest of the stuff you need to know about so that other people can do it for you. First off, who here has a vision statement or a mission statement in their company? Most of us, right? Most of us got a bunch of people in a room. We put some words up on a whiteboard. We voted on the favorite words we had. We kind of Mashed them up into a sentence. And that was our mission statement, right, Go, team. And that was supposed to align people, but it really didn't align anybody. Now, about 20 years ago, I went to an event in Vancouver, Canada, where we sat with a high performance sports psychologist who talked about looking into a crystal ball. He said if we could actually look forward into the future and visualize our company in the future, we could then figure out a way to reverse engineer that. So we talked about athletes and how high performance athletes will see themselves performing the event, and they'll literally go into their mind and. And play the event over and over and over in their mind until they can actually perform as if they're performing completely on instinct. We didn't know how to bring that into the business world yet. So he gave us another example of Brooke Shields. He said when Brooke Shields was getting married, she didn't like her legs, so she put a picture up on the refrigerator of what she wanted her legs to look like on her wedding day. But we know the marriage didn't work out. Andre ended up getting married to Steffi Graf. The crazy thing was they were Steffi Graf's legs on the refrigerator. So the visualization process worked. Unfortunately, it worked for Andre, and Steffi didn't work out so well for Brook. That still didn't help us. So then he talked to us about home builders. Now, has anybody here ever built a house or done a renovation? Okay, so think back to that process. I want you to remember the time at the very beginning of the process when you brought the contractor to your home to show him what you wanted the house to look like that you were going to build. Or you showed him pictures and sketches and drawings right before you'd hired them. So you were trying to get the contractor and into your mind to see what you can see. In fact, you were the CEO of the home building process, and your job was to get him to see what you could see so that he could go away for a couple weeks and draw blueprints and come back and hand you the blueprints that you'd sign off on. And then you would get your employees or their employees to recreate your dream by following the plan. But the only thing you were supposed to do was get the vision out of your mind in a way that other people can see it. In the business world, most of us have never done that. Most of our employees can't read our mind. Who here seen the movie the Sound of Music? There's a very famous scene in the movie the Sound. Now, who's never seen the movie? Do you have any idea what it's about? Okay, don't say anything. Who's got less than a bit of an idea? Who's got no idea what the movie's about? You've never seen it. Awesome. I'm going to use you as an example. So you have no idea what it's about? No idea. Okay, there's a really famous scene in the movie where they're having a picnic. Now, I want you to organize a picnic for Genius Network. The next event, it has to be just like the Sound of Music. It has to look like it, feel like it, be exactly like it. No idea what it looks like. Right. Should it be in a park, in the mountains or at a lake? At a park. At a park. Okay, perfect. And then where should we get the food? Should we bring it in gift, like picnic baskets? Should we buy it at a hut, or should we bring it from a grocery store? Picnic basket. Picnic baskets. Okay. And let's invite all of our kids to the picnic, too. Should the kids be dancing, playing croquet, or playing baseball? Dancing. Dancing. Okay, so you at least got one, right? But you completely screwed up the picnic. I said I wanted it to be just like the Sound of Music. It's not at a park, Jen. It's in the mountains. How could you screw this up? You're a smart person, but you can't read my mind. See, if Jen can't read my mind. If she doesn't know what the picnic looks like, if I'm the only one who's seen the picture, how could she possibly recreate it? The only thing that we are supposed to do as CEOs is. Is craft our vivid vision and communicate it with everyone with such clarity that they can make it happen for us. The rest of the stuff we have to get other people to learn how to do and get them to do our job is vision. And almost only vision. So if you're going to write a vivid vision, you got to get out of the box. You've got to go somewhere around nature. Somewhere where you can be around nature and be inspired. Like up by Joe's house in a cave at Camelback. And just sit down and relax and think about what the future of your company looks like. Now, I want you to pretend you're going into a time machine three years into the future, December 31, 2019. And you describe every aspect of what your company looks and feels like. You're the only one who knows this. Start by doing a mind Map just roughly writing down all the ideas of what your company looks like in the future, then pull it together. You want to take your rough ideas of what your company looks like and pull together some rough notes. Describe every aspect of your company. Describe marketing three years from now. Describe it. Describe finance. Describe operations. Describe the meeting rhythms. Describe what it feels like when you walk in the front door. Describe the energy. Describe what the customers are saying about you. Describe what the media is writing about you. Describe what the new employees feel like when they come for an interview. Describe it in such vivid detail as if it's happened. But don't worry about how it happens. That's your employee's job, to figure out how your job is to communicate three years from now. The next thing you need to do is just get a full rough draft written up. And I mean rough draft. It does not have to be a perfect one. In fact, you'll get a handout at the end where you'll see an example of my rough draft for my COO Alliance, Vivid Vision that I finished yesterday morning that I sent to Jen Hoodie, who's sitting right here. Jen took my rough draft and polished it, got design elements done. We got it to the printer today. You're the first people that are going to get to read it. It's my words, my ideas, but she polishes it. She's a writer who can make it pop off the page. My job isn't to be a great writer. It's to get out of my head so a writer can polish it and get design elements added to it so that it attracts people like a magnet. Now, when you read the vivid vision, either mine for the COO alliance or when other people read yours for your company, it has to be like a magnet. It has to pull people towards you. Now, if it attracts like a magnet, what else does it do? Right? It repels. You have to write a vivid vision in such a way that it pushes some people away from you. This is not a Kumbaya group hug. This is you with so much clarity saying, this is what it looks like. Who's with me? And the rest of the people can kind of go away. Great example of this was eight years ago when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. What was missing? The keyboard. Right? But he didn't care because he knew a few zealots would get so excited that we'd all want to try it. And then all of a sudden we'd catch it. Instead of trying to emulate the BlackBerry, which is now kind of like disco, you write Your vivid vision in such a way that it completely aligns everyone in your company so that then they're all pulling in the same direction for you. Now, when you write a vivid vision and you roll it out, people are only used to seeing vision statements. And I want you to share this with customers, suppliers, employees. But it's going to feel really stupid. In fact, I'm going to show you a video of what it feels like when you write your first vivid vision and start sharing it with the world. You're going to feel like a little bit of an idiot. Let's say that this is you and you're rolling out your vivid vision for the first time. Now, you know that if you dance long enough, someone else might dance with you. Well, you know that if you communicate your vision long enough, someone else will start to get it. Usually a sales guy joins in with you first. You're going to communicate your vivid vision every day, every week, every chance you talk to the media, every time you talk to your bank or your accountant, your supplier, you talk about the future, not today. If they ask you a question about today, you answer with a future state three year out description. But it feels really stupid. For about three months, it feels really, really stupid. You're going to keep dancing, you're going to keep communicating. You're going to keep communicating until all of a sudden a marketing person joins in. Now look at some of the people sitting close to you. So marketing guys joined in, sales guys joined in, some of the finance and IT people will be the last ones to ever stand up and dance. Your spouse is going to think you've completely lost it because everyone can only see today. But you're going to communicate about the future until people join you and see how long it takes to get to the night before you become that overnight success, or how long it takes to get to the night before people start to see your vision. So you keep communicating it. This is the reason this is the only thing you're supposed to be able to do is you're the only one who can really feel it. Until other people start to join you, you keep communicating your vivid vision. You share this at every chance you get. You put it on your website, you give it to potential customers, potential suppliers, you give it to your accountant, your lawyer. And all of a sudden, people start to see it. They don't worry about what it looks like today because they're so inspired by the future that they're going to join you. This guy danced until everybody danced. He danced until 45,000 people were dancing goes on for about another minute. But the reality is, vision without execution is hallucination. That's why you need your great employees, so they can make your vivid vision come true.