What You're Doing WRONG in Your Vivid Vision

Do you have a vision statement for your business? In a few months, almost every CEO will be looking at a year end statement to see if theirs needs updating. According to Cameron Herald, it doesn't need updating. It needs to be flushed down the toilet. Vision statements just don't work. Cameron Herold is known around the world as the CEO Whisperer. Some people start out young and burn out quickly. Not Cameron. At 21, he employed 14 people. At 35, he built his first of two $100 million companies. By 42, Cameron engineered 1-800-got- junk, the world's largest residential junk removal company with spectacular growth from 2 million to 106 million in revenue and 3,100 employees. And he did it in just six years. What he did was so impressive, it became a case study at Harvard Business School. He's now a coach to a monarchy and a big four wireless carrier, as well as dozens of CEOs and COOs. His successes, and yes, the occasional failures have given him insight into the tried and true systems that work. Cameron's title is Vivid Visions.

So just a quick show of hands, who actually has a vision statement or a mission statement? That one sentence statement. Okay, all of you, great. So the reason I actually want to tell you to throw it out, the concept of the vivid vision I originally rolled out in my first book, which is called Double Double. It ended up on Richard Branson's island, Necker Island. But when the island got destroyed by the hurricane back in September, my book ended up somewhere out in the Atlantic. So I had to write the book Vivid Vision to actually document it a little bit more thoroughly for you. So you're all getting a copy of that today as well. Most of us had a blank whiteboard in our offices and we took a bunch of the words and threw them up on the whiteboard and then eliminated words and we ended up with our little mission statement. Right? Go team. The reason that that doesn't work and has never worked is it's never really given our employees enough of a full picture of what we're thinking about. So 18 years ago, I was invited to a lunch. 120 entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Canada were invited to a luncheon. And we were told to look into a crystal ball. Well, we thought that was a really flaky idea, looking into the crystal ball. We didn't know how to apply it to the business world, but it was a high performance sports psychologist talking to us about visualization. And he was talking about how athletes will visualize themselves performing the event, how athletes will roll themselves through the event. They'll close their eyes and picture themselves going over and over and over through the event. And that process of visualization helps them compete completely on instinct. So we didn't know how to take that analogy into the business world. So we looked for another analogy. And he told us about Brooke Shields. He said when Brooke 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 up on the refrigerator. Well, we know that the marriage between Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields didn't work out. He ended up getting married to Steffi Graf. The crazy thing was those were Steffi Graf's legs on the refrigerator. So the process of visualization did work. Unfortunately, it worked for Andre. So the number one thing you're learning today is go home and take down all the photos off your refrigerator. Okay, so that still didn't help us. We didn't know how to take the concept of visualization, bring it into the business world. But we found out that home builders use visualization every day. So a quick show of hands, if you've built a house or done a renovation. Okay, almost all of you, great. Think back to that process. That time when you were first meeting with the contractor. You were the CEO of the home building project. You were the one that had the vision of the home. You didn't give the contractor a one sentence statement and say, build me my dream home. Here's 2 million bucks and leave. That's a vision statement. That one sentence. Build me my dream home and I'll go away for a year. They're going to screw it up because they can't read your mind. You gave them sketches and drawings and pictures. You talked about how your family entertained and how you used the home and how many kids you would have and where your friends would be like you told them more. So they could take your vision and go away and create blueprints and come back with the blueprints and hand the blueprints to your employees and the employees could recreate your dream. That's where the analogy of the vivid vision started to come from. The vivid vision becomes a four or five page written document describing your company three years and only three years from now, in the future, you roll your camera ahead December 31st, three years from now. And I want you to think about what your business looks like, acts like, and feels like. And I've given you two sample copies of Vivid Visions for two of my businesses. When you read through those, I want you to ask yourself if you understand my business better than your employees understand yours. Who's seen the movie the Sound of Music? Okay, who's never seen the movie the Sound of Music? Who has no idea what the movie the Sound of Music's about? But you've never seen it, so don't say anything. There's a really famous scene in the movie, and I need to tease you a little bit for this to work, but there's a really famous scene in the movie where they're actually having a picnic. Now, I want you to recreate the picnic scene for me perfectly, like the movie the Sound of Music. Should it be in a park, in the mountains, or at a lake? Okay, park. Perfect. And where do we get the food? Should we get it at a grocery store, at a hut in the park, or should we bring it in a basket? Bring it in a basket. And let's bring kids to the picnic as well. Should the kids be dancing, playing baseball, or playing croquet? Playing croquet. Thank you, Jason, but you completely screwed up my picnic. See? I said, and you're the smartest guy. You're in the 100k group. I said I need it to be just like the Sound of Music. But because you've never seen the movie, you can't recreate it. It's in the hills or alive in the Alps, not in a park. And they're dancing. There was a theme, the Sound of Music. It wasn't the sound of croquet. But most of us in our businesses give a one sentence statement to people and expect them to read our minds. And we get frustrated because we're intuitive and they're not. The reason they're not intuitive is they can't see what we can see. Your only real job as the CEO is to communicate the vision. To communicate the picture of what your business looks and feels like. And the one sentence vision statement isn't enough. Even in traction. When they give you the Vision Traction Organizer, a list of a bunch of bullet points that doesn't explain the full picture of what your company can look like. Imagine doing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture would be like. You could do it, but it would take a lot longer. If you're writing a vivid vision, 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. Go to a park, go to the mountains. Go sit up at the top of Camelback. Go sit somewhere where you're not in your business. No laptop, no iPad, no technology. Take a notepad. And I want you to pretend like you're traveling in the future. You're hopping into a time machine, and you're going three years out into the future. And I want you to start doing a mind map and describing your entire company. Describe operations. Three bullet points about operations, three about marketing, three about it, about engineering, about sales. I want you to write down three or four bullet points about what your customers are saying about you, what the media is writing about you, what your employees are saying. I want you to talk about your supplier relationships. I want you to talk about the buzz that you feel when you walk in. I want you to talk about the culture and your meeting rhythms and your dashboards. But don't worry about how it comes true. Remember, the homeowner's job is to describe what the home looks like. The contractor's job is to figure out the plans, and the employee's job is to execute the plans. As Annie pointed out yesterday, your leadership team is the group that figures out the plans to make your vision come true. You articulate the vivid vision and then you grow leaders so they can actually put the plans in place, and then you can coach them, and they can coach the team to execute. You get all the bullet points written down from a mind map, and you organize them into rough notes. You pull a bunch of the rough notes together, and then you can create your first draft of your vivid vision. Now, Jennifer Houde, she's not here today, but Jennifer has actually written dozens and dozens and dozens of the final drafts of vivid visions for CEOs all over the world. I get requests all the time from all of my books about vivid visions. They all get directed to Jennifer's team, and she helps polish them off the page because you give it to a professional writer and they can pop it. They can take your rough work and really make it pop. Then you add some graphic design elements to it. This is a client who I've coached for four years, from 50 employees up to 700 employees. They just raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus, one of the top tier investment banks who bought into the company about a $2 billion valuation. Because of the dream of the vivid vision. When you can raise 255 million and you're only doing 200 million in revenue, they're buying into something, and it's not your business plan. They're buying into the dream. Your vivid vision when you write it has to be like a magnet. It has to completely compel people and pull them towards you. Now, if it's like a magnet, what else does a magnet do? It attracts. What else does it do? It repels. It has to be able to push some people away as well. This is not a Kumbaya group hug. Your job as the CEO is to articulate what you see, what you can feel, and then attract the potential employees, the customers, and the suppliers towards you because they vibrate with you. I ran this session years ago. I went into a conference, and CEO brought me in to speak to all of his employees. We ran a big session around it. Then he read his vivid vision to all of his employees, and he said, you know, about 15% of you hate what you just heard. He said, that's okay. It's the right time for you to quit. But the 85% of you that love what you just heard, click to the next slide. He said, tomorrow, go to this office address. Because today, while we've been off site as a company, a moving company came and packed up our entire company and moved all 70 of us to this new location. Now, if you're excited by that idea, it was like, hell, yeah, let's do this right. But if you weren't, 15% of his employees did quit. And a year and a half later, he ranked as the number two company in British Columbia to work for. Another client that I coached, Nurse Next Door ranked as number one.

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The alignment around vision is critical, and the one sentence mission statement has never worked. And we know it's never worked because whenever we created it with our teams, we all walked out saying, they just don't have the same alignment that I want them to have. We can try to create picnics like the Sound of Music and end up playing croquet, or you can craft your vivid vision and have everybody on the same page.