Why Your Vision Statement Sucks (And What to Do Instead)

In companies, we're taught in business school to have vision statements. So the classic way to do it is you get a bunch of great employees into a room, put a bunch of your favorite words up on a whiteboard. You vote on all the favorite words that you got. You got 7 or 8 words left over, right? You put them into one big sentence. That's your mission statement. Go team. Even the owner of the company or the leader of the company knows it doesn't make any sense at all. But that's the only tool we have to align you. And in our lives, we're left with nothing other than a vision board, which we can't share with anybody else. We all walk out of those going, that sucks. 10 years ago, I began traveling around the world working with CEOs, and over the last 10 years I've been in 28 countries on 5 continents working with CEOs of some of the major organizations, but also dealing with a lot of their people. I started to notice something that was happening. What was happening was this unbelievable lack of vision. I want you to think back to a job that you had recently or a job that you're in now. Think about the company for a second. How clear were you on where the CEO was taking the company? How clear are you on what the decisions were and why they were being made? How clear were you really on what your role was in that organization? I think most of the people in most companies are showing up every day a little bit confused, a little bit unorganized, a little bit perplexed, a little lost. They're not really sure why they're there. They kind of show up every day making their best guesses and trying their best, but really it's almost like herding cats. Having been a CEO and having been a COO, we often find that we're trying to hold people accountable and align people, but it's really because of this lack of vision. You walk into any of the great companies and you can see the one big difference. Either they know where they're going or they really don't. And most people are only making mistakes not because they want to, But they're making mistakes because they're making their judgments based on what they can see, not necessarily what the entrepreneur or the CEO can see. So I want you to think about the average person, just the average individual around the world, and think about their lives. Think about your life today. Are you really clear on where you're taking your life over the next 3 years? Do you wake up in the morning aligned with those goals? Are you making decisions aligned with your core values, or align where you see yourself as an individual? Or are you merely waking up first thing in the morning and looking at your iPhone and checking your email and being busy and kind of getting on with the day? Most people wake up in the morning and just start, but without any real direction. Then you kind of end up somewhere, but if you don't know where you're going, anywhere will take you there. What about families? If you've got a family or you're building a family, maybe you've got a spouse. What's happening actually in your family? Is your family actually aligned and organized, or are you actually starting fights and arguments? You know, what's popularized in the business world are these vivid visions, or these vision boards. I'm sorry, the vision boards were popularized in the movie The Secret, where you take a bunch of pictures and sketches and drawings, you make a little mosaic, and you hang them up in your home. Maybe they're in your kitchen or they're in your bathroom or your closet. Maybe they're above your desk at the office. And they work really well for one person, but they don't really work very well for a group of people because a picture says a thousand words. So, if you do your own vision board, you cut out a picture. Let's say it was a picture of this stage. You might be honing in on the red carpet or the burgundy jacket. I was told to wear black, but then we weren't allowed to wear black. Or if I said, what's the picture you see on stage? You might see the red TED. But if I was talking about the two monitors on the floor, our pictures are different because we all interpret what we want to see. So a vision board doesn't work for more than just one person. So that's what happens is we get lost. In companies, we're taught in business school to have vision statements. So the classic way to do it is you get a bunch of great employees into a room, put a bunch of your favorite words up on a whiteboard, You vote on all the favorite words that you got. You got 7 or 8 words left over, right? You put them into one big sentence. That's your mission statement. Go team. Right? We all walk out of those going, that sucks. Even the owner of the company or the leader of the company knows it doesn't make any sense at all, but that's the only tool we have to align you. And in our lives, we're left with nothing other than a vision board, which we can't share with anybody else. Take a look at this. Two of the mission statements for two great organizations. You have the Make-A-Wish Foundation, an organization we'd all love to support, but that's the direction we're going in. That's all we know. The people every day will share the power of a wish. We don't know how they're supposed to act. We don't know how they're supposed to behave. We don't know what their culture is like. We don't— we don't know enough about it. So we don't have a tool. Or the San Diego Zoo, the same idea. Countless vision statements are broken. In fact, my BHAG, my big hairy audacious goal, is to replace vision statements worldwide with the concept I'm going to teach you today of vivid vision. So, the vivid vision is around looking into a crystal ball. I know that sounds a little bit weird, but when I was taught the topic, taught the concept about looking into the future, they talked to us about athletes and how these high-performance athletes like high jumpers would visualize themselves performing the event. Well, imagine if you could visualize yourself as an individual and what your life looked like 3 years from now, or as a family member. Maybe it's your husband and wife, or two partners building a family, and you actually both merge your visions of where you see your family in a few years, and you create a concept called this Vivid Vision. The Vivid Vision is going to become a 4 or 5-page written document describing your life or your family or your company 3 years in the future. Now, if you work for a company today and you're unclear as to where your company is going, I want you to share this video with your CDO and with the leadership team so they can get an idea as to how to actually align you. It's not by holding you accountable, it's to share what they see in their mind with you in a way that you can start to read their mind. See, high-performance athletes will literally visualize themselves performing the event. They'll go hundreds of times, they'll close their eyes and think of themselves and visualize themselves performing the event. My wife rides equestrian, she rides horses and she's jumping. We were talking about one of the events she was doing this weekend and I said, "Just close your eyes the night before and picture yourself going over these crazy huge jumps and how successful you're doing it." And today she had her best ride ever. Mary Lou Retton, the gymnast, would walk around the gymnastics floor looking at index cards of her routine and she would walk the floor and stop at each part on the floor and picture herself doing that part of the routine over and over again. You'll see downhill skiers that will do their course and they'll close their eyes and they'll literally ski parts of the course. And I've skied courses in the past that I can still remember every little turn in my mind because I skied it so many times. So this process of visualization works really well for athletes. How do we bring it into the business world, or how do we bring it into our personal lives or our families? We look at another example of home builders. So if you ever build a home or done a renovation, the real CEO of that project is the homeowner. The homeowner has a clear vision of what they want their home to look like, but they don't know how to do the plumbing or electrical. They don't know how to put up the walls, but they can get their vision, their sketches and drawings and pictures out, and they hand it to the homeowner, the contractor, and the contractor can literally draw blueprints or the plans to make their vision come true. Years ago, we were doing a renovation at our home and we had this fireplace that we really wanted it to look like. I remember sitting down with the contractor and talking about the fireplace, agonizing over the detail I wanted him to understand. And I finally took this picture and I handed it to him. I said, "Like this?" He goes, "Yeah, Cameron, I get it." I go, "No, no, it has to look like this." He goes, "It will. It'll look exactly like that picture." Now, he came back a month later with the blueprints and plans. We signed off on the whole home. And about 6 months later, I remember walking in the front door of the home and walking in and stopping and going, "Oh my gosh." And on the other side of the room, across the hallway, on the other edge of the living room, was this fireplace. And it looked exactly like I remembered from the drawing. And I walked across the room, and I walked up to the edge of the fireplace, and there was a worker sitting on the ground right beside the fireplace, finishing it off. And he looked up at me, and he said, "Is it what you wanted?" I said, "It's exactly what I wanted." And he pointed to the wall, and taped to the wall beside the fireplace was the little picture. So, of course, he could recreate my dream. Because he could see what I could see. Well, in the business world, the employees can't read the entrepreneur's mind because they've kept all that information in their mind. Their job is to get it out of their mind in a way that other people can share it. As individuals, our job is to get our vivid vision of what we want our lives to look like and get it out of our mind and into a 4 or 5-page document so we can share it with all of our friends and our families and our support groups so they can help make it happen. Because if you're the only one who can see the vision, you have no support network. This vivid vision becomes your guiding compass. I actually have a personal vivid vision that I read at least 2 or 3 times a week. It's a 4-page document. It's on my phone. I welcome you to take a look at it during the break. If you'd like to ask me, I can show it to you, or if you send me an email, I'll send you a copy of it as well. I have one for my business, and I have one for another group that I've just started called the CEO Alliance. So I have 3 different vivid visions for my businesses and my personal life. And those are the guiding compasses for me. That's how you start making decisions at where you're going. And I can share that with everyone so they start knowing who to introduce me to to help make it happen. In fact, I've actually codified this idea of the vivid vision in a book that's coming out. And I'll give samples of vivid visions in the book. But the idea was to take what— unfortunately, we only get 15 minutes today. And, and really kind of build it out for you in about 120 pages of examples of how to do them, how to write them, how to use them. But it's so critical that the best companies in the world are actually now using them. If you're writing a vivid vision, you got to get out of the box. You can't sit in your office and write it. You can't sit at home and write it where you're around your friends or family or kids. You've got to get out of the box somewhere. You have to go somewhere where you're inspired, somewhere around nature. Now, where we live, we're surrounded by it. Go to the top of Grouse Mountain or go sit by the ocean. I used to sit in my backyard in a hammock. I put my headphones on, I would listen to music, the Grateful Dead, and I would just start to actually dream. I would almost pretend that I'd gone into a time machine 3 years out into the future. I traveled to December 31st, 3 years from now, and I look at what I can see. And I start doing a mind map and I start describing every aspect. Let's talk in this case of my business. I would talk about what marketing looks like 3 years in the future, what operations would be like, what IT or engineering. I talk about what the customers are saying about you and I come up with 3 or 4 bullet points for each area of the business. What the suppliers are saying, what the media is writing about us. And I don't worry about how it happens. I just start describing that future state. If you're thinking about it in your personal lives, I want you to think the same way. What are your— how are you making money? What are your relationships like with your friends? What are you doing in terms of fitness? What's your spirituality or faith like? Right? How does your normal typical day work? And you start writing these ideas down without worrying about how you're going to make it happen. But then you start to build it out. Your rough notes, your mind map, can become a first draft or a rough, maybe 3 or 4-page Word document. I taught this concept years ago at a session I was running at MIT. It was held at an MIT offsite for a group of entrepreneurs. And this one entrepreneur, Sebastian Tondor from Geneva, Switzerland, had a company called MCI. And MCI was a meeting and planning company. They're now the second largest meeting and planning company in the world. They're the largest in Europe. But at the time, he was doing $100 million in revenue, and his idea was to create this half a billion dollar company 3 years later. So Sebastian started to draft what his company would look like 3 years out without worrying about how it was going to happen. He rolled out this vivid vision to all of his employees. This was 2009, and in 2012, he'd done $506 million in revenue with $120 million EBITDA. Imagine taking your company from $106 million in revenue to $100 million in profit over 3 years. Sebastian then did his 2015 vivid vision to take the company from half a billion to a billion dollars in revenue. And about 2 years later, he sent me an email saying his biggest competitor in the world had gone bankrupt and they were picking up the thesis in acquisitions. They didn't get to the billion, they got to about $806 million. But imagine as a 36-year-old taking your company over 6 years from $100 million to $800 million. And he credits the alignment of this concept of the Vivid Vision that had everyone literally on the same page. So, when you get your rough draft of your Vivid Vision done, you give it to a writer. You know, we're not writers. But you take your rough work, your 4-page rough draft, and you hand it to a writer, and they can really polish it and make it pop off the page. You give it to a friend, or you put it out on Upwork, wherever you go, but get someone who can really make it jump. And that's where really people start to get excited. When you write a vivid vision, it has to be like a magnet. It has to pull people and compel them towards you. Now, if it pulls and compels them towards you, you also want it to push some people away. It has to repel as well. This is not a kumbaya group hug. You're not looking to try to get everyone to fall in love with it. You only want the core people who really, really care. And you actually want to push some people away. Use the example of Steve Jobs 10 years ago when they came out with the iPhone. The big thing that was missing on the iPhone was the keyboard. Remember, we all thought he was crazy. How could you release a phone with a keyboard? Now BlackBerrys are kind of like disco, right? Disco used to be cool. Please don't look at the BlackBerry. But he was okay with releasing something that was so insanely great knowing that as soon as we try it and heard those initial clicks, we would all be compelled to have one and try it. And then he had us because he was willing to push some people away. And again, we all know where they are. So this concept of a vivid vision is where the alignment really starts to happen in the business world. That's where your customers, your suppliers, your employees, your potential employees, your bankers, everyone can now see what you're building. I have clients that I've coached around the world that have taken their vivid vision into the bank. And received bank funding. And the banker's quotes were, "I finally understand your company. I never really understood the business plan. I never really understood the financials." It's like a set of blueprints for a home. You don't quite get it, but if you can see the drawings, then it makes sense. And I don't want to see the spreadsheet around how the home is going to be built and what it's going to cost. I need to see the vivid vision. I've had other clients that have taken their vivid vision and they've landed customers who were so excited about what the company looked like 3 years from now that they actually signed on to be a customer, even though the company looks completely different today. Now, when you're rolling out a Vivid Vision, whether it's a personal one or a family one or a business one, it feels really stupid because everyone else around you has only ever seen the mission statement. So just trust the process. The more you talk about it, the more you share it, the more you think about it, the more it starts to come true. But it takes a little while for it to start to catch. But the alignment is really powerful. So, I want you to think about your lives for a second as individuals. Do you want to continue waking up every single day with the off chance that success might happen, that happiness might be there, that your goals might be met? Or are you ready to actually take a really proactive step and draft what your vivid vision looks like? Are you ready to lean out 3 years and only 3 years into the future and design what your business looks like or your personal life looks like or your family looks like. If you're ready to make that step, I challenge you this week to write your Vivint Vision and start sharing it with everyone because we're all willing to help you make it happen.