How Top CEOs Plan for Success in Just 8 Minutes!

When you write a vivid vision, it has to magnetize. It has to literally pull people towards you when you write one. It also has to be able to push some people away. You're not trying to get everybody to love you. Remember when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone about seven, eight years ago? What was missing on the iPhone? The keyboard. Right. Like, what a disaster. Why would you ever introduce a phone without a keyboard? What an idiot. Well, the reality was there was about 3% of the people that thought he was genius and they loved it. And they started to rally around it. And then a few more and a few more. He didn't try to appeal to everybody. I want to talk a little bit about a concept called Vivid visions. And I know we've all got vision statements. I really would like all of you to throw it out because we all know how they were made. We all know that you started with a whiteboard. You got a whole bunch of your people from your company. You put a bunch of words up on the whiteboard, put up all the words that inspired you, and then you kind of eliminated a bunch of the words, and you end up with something that looks like this. And you call that your mission statement. And you kind of throw it out there and it goes live. And this is what's supposed to align and inspire your team. But we know that it doesn't align and inspire anybody. So what I want to do is teach you a concept that is being used by some of the top companies on the planet, but is also being used by some of the top athletes on the planet. I went to a lunch that was run by a high performance sports psychologist and he sat us all down in the room and he said he wanted us to look into a crystal ball. And we thought, oh God, this is going to be a complete waste of time. Well, the reason he wanted us to look into a crystal ball is he wanted us to show us what athletes would do, how high performance athletes would would visualize themselves performing the event. He said if as CEOs, if we could visualize ourselves running our company three years in the future and if we could get everyone to see what we could see, we would win. So this concept we've created is called a vivid vision. It's one thing that will completely align your employees, your customers and suppliers. Think about this for a second. Remember when Brooke Shields was getting married to Andre Agassiz, she didn't like her legs, so she put a picture of what she wanted her legs to look like on her wedding day up on the refrigerator and she wanted to visualize these perfect legs. Well, we all know the marriage between she and Andre didn't work out. He ended up getting married to Steffi Graf. The crazy thing was the photo on the refrigerator was actually Steffi Graf's legs. Alright, so visualization works. We now know the number one task you have tomorrow is go back. You need to go back to your homes and rip down the photos off your refrigerator. They're motivating the wrong person. So that didn't help us, so we looked for something that did work. So when you build a home, you're really the CEO of the project. You have an idea of what the finished project looks like. You, you can see it, you can feel it, but you have no idea how to do the electrical, how to do the plumbing, how to do the wiring, how to do the drywall, but you know what it needs to look like. And you have no idea how to manage the sub trade. So what you do is you give photos and pictures and sketches and things out of magazines and you hand them to the contractor. Those are your visions of what the home should look like in the future. The contractor then takes those and goes away for a couple weeks and come back with the blueprints or the plans to make your vision happen. And then they hand the plans to the employees, and the employees can literally read your mind. Well, for most of us, when we have a vision statement as one sentence, it doesn't describe your whole company. So the idea with a vivid vision is something much different. But the problem with us as CEOs is we see the future. We have all this detail and we walk around saying that we're highly intuitive. We are no more intuitive than our employees. But if we're the only ones that can see the movie, how can they possibly see what we can see? So the tool, this vivid vision tool that I've created is one that you actually write and describe your company three years in the future. You describe it in vivid detail. When you're writing one, you've got to get out of the box. You can't sit in your office and write this. You have to go somewhere where you're inspired, somewhere around nature, because it will pull the ideas out of you. I want you to pretend you're literally going into a time machine and you describe your company in vivid detail. So when you've gone into the time machine, you're standing in the future, you're looking around, you do a mind map and you describe every area of your business. You describe marketing, you describe it, you Describe finance. You literally pretend you're standing in those business areas, describing what you see. You write two or three bullet points describing the physical office space, describing the culture, describing the energy. You write about what the media is saying about you. You write about what the customers are saying about you. You write about the pulse and the feelings as if you're standing in the future. And then your job is to pull those together into some rough notes. And then you get the rough notes and you combine them so they tell the one story. Your job as the entrepreneur stops at this point. Your unique ability is not to be a great writer. So you follow the Dan Sullivan method. You get it 80% done. You then pass it off really quickly to a great writer who can make it pop off the page. They can take your rough draft and make it pop, and then you hand it yet again to the next person and they can add some graphic design elements to take your brand and really elevate it to the next level. Now, when you share this vivid vision with every employee, every customer, every potential customer, every supplier, everyone can now see what you can see. Imagine if every single person you ever touched could see the same detail of your business three years in the future that you then you can figure out how to reverse engineer it and put the plans in place and get the people in place to make it happen. When Jim Collins talked about first who, the part that he was missing was, we need the who that can make that vision come true. But if you have a one sentence vision statement, at best, they're guessing. When you write a vivid vision, it has to magnetize. It has to literally pull people towards you when you write one. It also has to be able to push some people away. You're not trying to get everybody to love you. Remember when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone about seven or eight years ago? What was missing on the iPhone? The keyboard. Right. Like, what a disaster. Why would you ever introduce a phone without a keyboard? What an idiot. Well, the reality was there was about 3% of the people that thought he was genius and they loved it. And they started to rally around it. And then a few more and a few more. He didn't try to appeal to everybody. Now if you've got a BlackBerry, it's kind of like disco, right? Blackberries used to be cool. So was disco. But he didn't try to appeal to everybody. He tried to appeal to that one core group that would become the monomaniacs and they would actually spread it. What happens with a vivid vision when you roll it out? Is it Starts to align. It starts to get everyone completely pulling in the same direction. Now when you roll one out, it's going to feel really stupid. Remember, everyone was trained the same way by a bunch of teachers who have never actually run businesses. So they told us to do a mission statement, so that's all we really know. Also, when you talk about the future in this detail, in three or four pages describing the future, people keep showing you what today looks like. So. So I'm going to show you a video of what it feels like to roll out a vivid vision. I'm going to show you a video of a guy dancing. I want you to pretend that this is you. This is you rolling out your vivid vision. And you're convinced that if you talk about it and share it with enough people, it will start to happen. But nobody joins in. You look at some of your suppliers sitting close to you, your spouse who's now completely sure that you've gone off the deep end. And you keep talking about the company three years in the future with all this detail, but. But they can only see today. Usually a salesperson joins in. First, you're gonna keep talking about the vivid vision. You're gonna keep sharing it. You're gonna put it on your website, you're gonna share it with the media. Every interview that you do with the media, you're gonna share it. And slowly what starts to happen is nothing. People start bugging you about it. They start pointing out that you're wrong. They start showing you that you're only focused on today. The Vivid vision is three years out. 33% of it will happen in year three. 33% of it will happen in year two. 33% will happen in year one. Much like building a house where you build the foundation, but you have to keep talking about it. A marketing guy will join in. Second, you keep communicating the vision until people are making fun of you. The marketing guy will join in, the sales guy will join in. And it's still three, four months that you're talking about the future and no one joins in. All of a sudden, a couple operations people will show up. It's usually marketing, sales operations, the analyticals won't join in ready yet. Finance people will start to show up. The media writes about you. All of a sudden people are like, wow, we can all see this. They're starting to make the same decisions based on intuition that you would make. And now you're starting to see that it's actually starting to flood a little bit more applications coming into your company. When we built one, 800 got junk. The first year we ranked number one in British Columbia, this is what it felt like the following year. Number two in British Columbia, this is what it felt like the following year. Number two in all of Canada to work for was because people were completely aligned with where we were going. We didn't pay anymore, we didn't have any better branding, but we had complete and utter alignment across the media, our customers, our suppliers. This goes on for about another two minutes until 45,000 people ended up dancing because one guy was going to dance until everybody danced. Now, if you want to figure out how to put the vision in place, you got to read the next 12 chapters of the book. Thanks for having me.