Page 38 - 6484

Mission, Vision, and Leading
Leading involves influencing others toward the attainment of organizational
objectives. Leading and leadership are nearly synonymous with the notions of
mission and vision. We might describe a very purposeful person as being “on a

mission.” As an example, Steve Demos had the personal mission of replacing cow’s
milk with soy milk in U.S. supermarkets, and this mission led to his vision for, and
strategy behind, the firm White Wave and its Silk line of soy milk
[4]
products. Similarly, we typically think of some individuals as leaders because they
are visionary. For instance, when Walt Disney suggested building a theme park in a
Florida swamp back in the early 1960s, few other people in the world seemed to
share his view.
Any task—whether launching Silk or building the Disney empire— is that
much more difficult if attempted alone. Therefore, the more that a mission or vision
challenges the status quo—and recognizing that good vision statements always need
to create some dissonance with the status quo—the greater will be the organization’s
need of what leadership researcher Shiba calls “real change leaders”—people who
will help diffuse the revolutionary philosophy even while the leader (i.e., the founder
or CEO) is not present. Without real change leaders, a revolutionary vision would
remain a mere idea of the visionary CEO—they are the ones who make the
implementation of the transformation real.
In most cases where we think of revolutionary companies, we associate the
organization’s vision with its leader—for instance, Apple and Steve Jobs, Dell and
Michael Dell, or Google with the team of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Most
important, in all three of these organizations, the leaders focused on creating an
organization with a noble mission that enabled the employees and management team
to achieve not only the strategic breakthrough but to also realize their personal
dreams in the process. Speaking to the larger relationship between mission, vision,
strategy, and leadership, are the Eight principles of visionary leadership, derived from
Shiba’s 2001 book, Four Practical Revolutions in Management (summarized in
[5]
“Eight Principles of Visionary Leadership” ).
Eight Principles of Visionary Leadership
• Principle 1: The visionary leader must do on-site observation leading
to personal perception of changes in societal values from an outsider’s point of
view.
• Principle 2: Even though there is resistance, never give up; squeeze the
resistance between outside-in (i.e., customer or society-led) pressure in
combination with top-down inside instruction.
• Principle 3: Revolution is begun with symbolic disruption of the old or
traditional system through top-down efforts to create chaos within the

organization.
• Principle 4: The direction of revolution is illustrated by a
symbolically visible image and the visionary leader’s symbolic behavior.
• Principle 5: Quickly establishing new physical, organizational, and
behavioral systems is essential for successful revolution.
• Principle 6: Real change leaders are necessary to enable revolution.

38