First They Don't Believe you, Then They Follow You!

This concept has worked all over the world because you have a movie in your mind and no one else can see what you can see. Now when you're rolling this out, it feels really stupid because you can see the future so clearly and you're trying to get everyone around you to see it. So you share this written document with your customers, suppliers, your employees, your potential employees. You share it with everyone because it doesn't say how you're going to do it, but it gets them to see what they can see. Normally, I'm speaking on big stages of like 400 to 4,000 people, so this is a bit of a different room. But I'm going to try to give you one of the core concepts that I never learned around growth. We went to a small event in Vancouver, Canada, in 1998, and it was about vision. And the person who came up to talk to us was saying, look into the crystal ball. And we're like, okay, let's get out of this room, because this is going to be a really cheesy concept. But he was a sports psychologist who worked with high performance Olympic athletes. And he talked about how athletes would literally visualize themselves performing the event and how they would replay the event over and over and over in their minds. And if they could actually feel themselves performing it in their mind when they actually performed for real, they could do it as if completely on instinct. So he said, if the CEOs could get the movie that we have in our mind out, if we could see our company three years in the future, we could then build it almost as if completely on instinct. So you think about visualization. When Brooke Shields was getting married to Andre Agassi, she didn't like her legs. So she put a picture up on the refrigerator of what she wanted her legs to look like. Unfortunately, we know that the marriage between Brooke Shields and Andre Agassi didn't work out. He ended up getting married to Steffi Grafton. The crazy thing was those were Steffi Graf's legs that were on the refrigerator. So the process of visualization did work. Unfortunately, it worked for Steffi and for Andre didn't work so well for Brooke. So take down all the photos of your refrigerator. That's step number one. That still didn't help us. We didn't understand how to leverage this idea of vision. So we looked for home builders as an example. When you build a house or do a renovation, Joe, you're just finishing yours. You really are the CEO of the home building project. You don't know how to do the work, but you know what the finished project needs to look like. So your role as the homeowner is to get the vision in your mind. The pictures, the sketches, the drawings, the photos from magazines, and hand them to a contractor who can then get the plans done to make your vision come true. And then the contractor takes the plans and gives it to employees who you've never met, and they can recreate your dream. That's where the vision idea came to real power or fruition for us. Now we've all got vision statements and mission statements. The problem is they don't work. And we actually intuitively know that they don't work because we all sat in a room with all our employees. We put all the favorite words up on a whiteboard. We voted on all the words. We eliminated all the words that got no votes. We had seven words left over. We mashed them up into a sentence. That's our vision statement. Go, team. And then we all walked out going, this is horse. It'll never work. So the vivid vision is more of a very detailed written description of what your company looks like. Entrepreneurs and CEOs are famous for saying that we're intuitive. We're actually no more intuitive than our employees. The thing is that we can see a very vivid vision of what our company looks like three years in the future. And we're frustrated that people make decisions that aren't in align with our vision, but it's because we haven't shown them the vision. So the idea is to take almost this movie that you have playing in your mind and write it in a way that they can see it. So if you're writing a vivid vision that describes your company, you have to get out of the box. You have to go somewhere where you're inspired, somewhere around nature, where you're literally out of the office. No laptop, no iPad. Take a notebook, turn it in landscape mode, and do a mind map and start describing what the company looks like. Pretend that you literally went into a time machine three years in the future, and you're standing, looking around your company, December 31st, three years from now. And you look around and you describe operations, describe it. Describe marketing, describe your remote employees, describe engineering, describe finance, describe what the media is writing about you describe what your customers are saying about you. Describe the pulse and the energy that you feel when you walk through the door. And if you describe it as if it's already completed, then your team can figure out how to make it come true. So the way you start to write this is you do a Mind map describing all of those areas. And then you pull together the rough ideas into rough bullet points and categorize them by section. And at this point, you're almost done as the CEO or entrepreneur. You just need to write a first draft version. Not perfect, even less than 80% done, just a rough version so that a real writer that you hand it off to can really make this thing jump and pop off the page. The key, though, is to have such vivid description and ideas that then you can add some graphic design elements to it to really make it inspiring. The idea of the vivid vision is it's supposed to be like a magnet. It's supposed to literally pull people towards you. But if it's like a magnet, what else does a magnet do? It repels. So it also has to push some people away. So remember about seven, eight years ago when Steve Jobs and Apple launched the iPhone and they showed us what this prototype of the iPhone was going to look like. What was it missing? The keyboard. Right. Remember back then, like, everything had a keyboard. It was like BlackBerrys, which are like disco now, right? But back then we're like, how could you release a phone without a keyboard? We thought they were nuts. I remember when I first saw one, I actually asked the guy if I could try it on day one. And he showed me how to type on it, and I was addicted right away. But when he launched it, they didn't care if you hated it. They only care that a few would obsess about it. Your vivid vision has to be written in such a way that you literally will magnetize some and push a bunch of others away. I sat with a group in Vancouver, Canada, a guy named Dean Gagnon. We ran this entire full hour presentation with all the other supporting chapters to all of his employees. Took all 80 of his employees off site for the day. And we ran this content. And at the end, Dean stood up and he said, I want to read you our company's vivid vision. I want to describe what our company looks like in the future. And he read out this three page document as everyone in the room got to read along with it. And at the end, Dean said, what you just heard probably excites 85% of you and 15% of you hate what you just heard. So it's probably the right time for the 18 or 15% of you to quit. Six weeks later, 15% of his company had quit. Dean actually clicked to the next slide. He said, tomorrow, when we come into the office, please go to this office address. Because today, while we were all off site, I had a moving company come and move us to our new location. Welcome to the future. Two years later, the alignment that had been created in Dean's company placed him as the number two company in British Columbia to work for. The number one company to work for was another client of mine, Nurse next Door. This is the area that companies really can lever is getting this full, vivid vision aligned. So I was written up in Forbes magazine in the physical print edition of Forbes magazine this January. And our governor, Doug Ducey from Arizona called me in because he'd read about the concept in Forbes and asked me if we could do a vivid vision for the state of Arizona. This concept has worked all over the world because you have a movie in your mind and no one else can see what you can see. Now, when you're rolling this out, it feels really stupid because you can see the future so clearly and you're trying to get everyone around you to see it. So you share this written document with your customers, suppliers, your employees, your potential employees. You share it with everyone because it doesn't say how you're going to do it, but it gets them to see what they can see. But when you roll it out, you feel a little bit lonely. I'm going to show you a video of a guy. This guy is dancing. Well, this video is you rolling out your vivid vision. You've got an idea, and you're going to literally roll this thing out until people line up behind you. But no one joins in right away. And the reason no one joins in is they can't see what you can see. You got a couple people close. A sales guy usually joins in first. So it's you. And a sales guy will start communicating the future. But look at some of the VPs sitting closest to you that don't stand up, or your accountant that nuts or your spouse that knows you've lost it for sure. But you keep communicating it over and over again. This is where Jim Collins in Good to Great talked about communicating your vision so often that people start making fun of you because it's only then when your ideas have started to stick. So you keep communicating over and over and over again. You know that you're going to dance until everybody dances, but it'll take three to six months before you start getting some traction. Sales guy joins in, marketing guy's dancing with you, and you keep dancing. So when we were building 1-800-got-Junk as an example, we were first rolling this vivid vision out of our company. We were only 20 employees and part of Our vivid vision was going to be that we were on Oprah. Took about six months for people to buy into the fact that we weren't completely stoned. And then about another six months to realize that maybe we had a shot. And sure enough, two years after we launched it, we actually were on Oprah. A full seven minute segment on the Oprah Show. A couple people more join in. The local media starts writing about your future. When the media interviews you, you don't answer the questions about today. You always talk about what the company looks like three years out and people start lining up behind that. But again, look at the people close to you that will never sign up. Those are the cultural cancers you have to get out of the company because it literally is that quantum mechanics thing of everyone lining behind it, all the energy behind the vision, and everyone communicating towards it. So as you've seen, this goes on for about another two minutes until 45,000 people danced because one guy had a vision and he was going to do it until people lined up behind them. So vision is the first part of the aligning concept. Then it comes into execution. As Thomas Edison said, that's when you get into the people and everything else.