Picture a hundred men and women sitting at a hundred desks in a massive room without windows. The only sound comes from the ticking of a clock on one wall; its pendulum swings back and forth in a slow, hypnotic arc. On each desk there is only a single yellow legal pad. The men and women stare at the blank pages. Staring. Staring. Staring.

Occasionally, an individual stands up and paces in a circle around a desk, sits back down, and resumes staring, staring, staring.

The group has been assigned the task of creating a corporate vision and a mission statement to go with it. They’re trapped in Vision/Mission Statement Hell.

By now everyone knows that we need a vision and a mission statement to define who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. All that’s necessary is to drill deep within the corporate and individual soul, and out will pour a gusher of rich, pure vision. This elixir will bring profits and contentment to all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking vision and mission statements. It’s necessary to have them, and it can be powerful and profitable when you do. But I have found that lifelessness leads to visionlessness. Most vision formulation and mission statements—the process that the imaginary group above is undergoing—do not grow out of a real, living, breathing context and therefore are dead on arrival. There’s no way they can be brought into play.

The unfortunates who are assigned and consigned to Vision/Mission Statement Hell will eventually come up with something. They’re disciplined, smart, and creative folks. But the end product will likely wind up in a filing cabinet or bottom drawer. That is, if they are lucky. Irrelevant and hollow vision and mission statements are acutely dangerous. Those who buy into them and then find out the hard way that the vision and mission statements are meaningless to senior management and investors, are destined to be confused, angry, and disillusioned. Those who see through it immediately withhold their trust and adopt cynical, self-protective attitudes.

Better no vision than a phony vision.

There are gurus galore available to help you create vision and mission statements. But beware. While it can be done—and is ultimately worth doing—it is a time-consuming and agonizing process. It’s necessary to simultaneously run a bottom-up/top-down analysis of what makes an operation tick and square it with what makes its people tock. When I talk to executives who have gone through the exercise, they suggest it degenerates into a production that is made by and for top management purposes alone.

The greatest of all vision and mission statements, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, proclaims that “all men are created equal.” The resonance of the statement comes from the word “all.” Unless you are prepared for the effort to bring “all” into the process, your vision and mission statements are going to be seriously flawed—and probably more trouble and far more subversive than they’re worth.

Connecting Vision to Action

If you’ve got your red notebook handy—and I hope you do—start a new page by writing I-O-N centered on the top line. Draw two lines radiating downward diagonally from the middle to the left and right bottom corners. Under the left line write A-C-T and under the right put the letters V-I-S. Connect them both with an arrow running left to right across the bottom of the page.

 

ACT (• ION) VIS (• ION)

 

This will serve as a reminder that action is the source of vision. Act derives from Latin: actus, to drive. Vis in ancient Greek means strength. There is no strength in a vision or mission statement that is not driven by action. The words could be attached with a hyphen: action-vision.

Living the action-vision is the true test of a vision and the accompanying mission statement. Measure every action against the vision, and you will see immediately how relevant the statement really is. Every hole needs to be filled to reinforce the integrity of the vision, otherwise it is being undermined or corrupted.

The action-vision connection offers the quickest, most direct role to creating and living a vision. Instead of addressing cosmic and semi-spiritual issues, focus on the nitty-gritty of your business. The way I’ve always done it is to set out to make my team the best.

It really is simple. Being the best is one of those universal human desires. Personally, we may not be overly aggressive or competitive, but there is still a instinct that drives us to claim a form of uniqueness that sets us apart and affirms our value. Knowing that we are the best or striving for it is powerfully reassuring. Conversely, being the worst—or believing that we are—is crushing.

My mom and dad had one hard and fast rule—do your best. I’ll bet yours did too. Paula Innis, who started out at Xerox’s typing pool in Columbus and now owns her own successful printing business, was kind enough to share her experiences and insights for this book. She recalls her own mother’s insistence that as African-Americans, her children would have to do their best—even better than best—and refuse to allow the racial prejudice and unfairness they experienced become an excuse for giving up and not doing their very best at all times.

Paula told me that her mom’s attitude was they were black—and so be it. If racial prejudice made it more difficult to succeed, she wasn’t about to let it become an excuse for failure. Paula was promoted out of the typing pool and she became a terrific sales rep under conditions that I know I couldn’t have surmounted. She was a single parent. Paula would pick up her kids after work, go home, cook dinner, and spend time with them. They’d all go to bed about nine o’clock. A few hours later, Paula would get up and start doing her preparation work for the next day. Three hours of sleep a night and she was still a great sales person.

Unbelievable. Nothing was going to stand in that woman’s way of being the best—the best parent, the best businesswoman. She works hard at it. Today her printing business is one of the best in the Midwest.

Paula’s role model is Oprah Winfrey. She intends to be as successful and influential as her hero. And she lives the vision every day.

Why can’t we all live big dreams?

Creating a Hard-Core Vision

A simple, powerful vision based on being the best is one that does not present difficulties in communicating its message and what’s required to achieve it. What does being the best in your business entail? I’ll give you a list of possibilities, starting with profits:

• Best overall profit margin.
• Best year-to-year profit growth.
• Best year-to-year revenue growth.
• Highest order volume.
• Highest year-to-year growth in orders.
• Best customer satisfaction.
• Best product quality.
• Lowest product return.
• Highest employee satisfaction.
• Highest employee retention.
• Best training.
• Best compensation plan.

You get the idea. Anything you can measure is a candidate for being cranked into the vision. What about the underlying philosophy? Remember the red notebook page: Action yields strength. The philosophy—a spiritual core—will follow and support the action. A genuine drive to be the best on so many fronts will require the best intentions, ethics, and professionalism.

Time and again, I’ve told my organizations that their performance—by objective standards—fell short of the best, that they were in effect cheating themselves and cheating me. I’ve never forgotten the words that my father leveled at me after my first academically disastrous year at the University of Dayton: “You cheated me.” I wince when I read them on this page. By wrapping vision around hard-core performance, rather than softer sentiments, you’re guaranteeing that you can live the vision and live up to it.

But let me emphasize that a vision of being the best is meaningless and destructive if it is not rigorously and systematically acted upon. An ambitious vision makes us feel good. It provides meaning and identity. However, proclaiming that you intend to be the best and then not achieving the vision or, worse, not trying hard enough, is just plain nuts.

Conducting a Reality Check

Another vision-making technique is to compile a list of the organization’s ho-hums—the stuff that’s boring and second rate. Ask your people at all levels to make ho-hum lists:

• The phones aren’t answered promptly or professionally.
• The offices are dirty or shabbily furnished.
• Supplies are inadequate.
• Customer complaints are not handled expeditiously.
• There’s too much redundant paperwork.
• Too many meetings.
• The product line needs to be updated.
• Sales reps only show up at the customer’s workplace to write new orders.
• Team leaders don’t listen to team members.
• There’s no training.

Instead of a hundred people sitting at a hundred desks and staring at a hundred yellow legal pads in Vision/Mission Statement Hell, give them one of these ho-hum lists as a vision platform. The visioneers could then write a statement that prescribes action to rectify the shortcomings. Does this seem too prosaic? It’s not. If you don’t do the basic stuff to the best of your ability, all the highfalutin words with their New Age connotations are meaningless.

Do a reality check on your vision and mission statements. Write them out from memory in your red notebook. Now. Don’t look them up. Write them down cold. Take your time. If you can’t do it, the vision and mission are as dead as doornails. If you were able to get some or all of it on paper, the next thing to do is identify the action elements: What do we do every day—or even occasionally—to realize the vision and mission. If that’s difficult to tally up, the vision and mission need improving—Now!

A Leadership Lesson: The Red Towel and the Black Hat

A good rule of thumb to judge a vision is whether or not you can see it. We should see the vision all around us. If you read my first book, Don’t Fire Them, Fire Them Up, you may recall the story of how I used a black knit ski cap to symbolize the reward I was offering for the achievement of a key sales goal in Xerox’s Cleveland district office. If the teams achieved the goal they were going to celebrate by going to Peak ‘n’ Peak, a popular resort to the east of Cleveland, for an all-expenses-paid trip. Whenever I ran a meeting, I had the black Peak ‘n’ Peak cap in my hand as a symbol of the goal.

What I didn’t include in that book was how I learned to use a symbol like that to accomplish leadership objectives.

I owe it to Coach Duffy. At Brooklyn Prep High School, we were fortunate to have a unique gym teacher and football coach named Bill Duffy. Coach Duffy looked like a shorter, balder version of the comic actor Drew Carey. He was a character. Tough as nails, quick to criticize, with a lightning fast Irish sense of humor. It was a badge of honor among football players to get your head ripped off by Coach Duffy. We’d all sit around comparing notes afterward and laughing about it. He was one of those people you never forget.

Our traditional football rival was Saint John’s Prep, another Catholic high school in Brooklyn. We played them every Thanksgiving and the competition was ferocious. The importance of “The Game” was drilled into you from the first day you arrived at Brooklyn Prep. We weren’t a local football power by any means, but this matchup was for all the marbles.

I was a running back and quarterback—and not all that good, but that’s another story. In my junior year, on the first day of practice, Coach Duffy met with the team and laid out the goals for the year. Naturally, he was determined to achieve a winning season and to cap it off with a victory over Saint John’s. The goal was particularly important that year because it would be the last time the two schools would face each other. Sadly, Saint John’s was being closed for financial reasons. More than sixty years of tradition would be lost. Coach Duffy wanted that final victory, and he wanted it bad.

As his locker room talk drew to a close, he pulled out a red towel. Red was Saint John’s school color. The coach said that starting immediately one of the players would always be carrying the red towel. It would go with him to class and be on the field for practice. He said the towel would remind us what the season was all about.

Now you know where the black knit ski cap came from. But there’s more to the Coach Duffy story.

He taught a me a lot that season about being a leader. We beat all the other Jesuit schools. As Thanksgiving approached only one remained—Saint John’s, which, to be fair, had a much better team. But does Harvard admit that about Yale or Army give the edge to the Navy? No way! Even so, they were heavily favored. The game was to be carried on local New York TV—8 million people watching (okay, a couple of dozen relatives watching).

On the last day of practice before the game, rough, tough, aloof Coach Duffy did something unexpected. Traditionally, the student body was allowed to watch the final practice, but when the team got onto the field the stands were empty. The coaches were waiting in the usual spots for the team to begin warm-up calisthenics, so we got into the standard lines of six or seven deep and waited.

Coach Duffy told us to kneel on one knee and to look down. I remember thinking that this was a little odd. The coach was wearing the red towel in his belt. He spent the next hour going from player to player, standing over each of us, and in a quiet voice—though loud enough for the rest of the team to hear—thanking each boy for his contribution to the team. He summarized the highs and lows of our football careers, noted the special contributions we’d made, and how much each individual meant to him. As he went up and down the lines, you could hear the kids sniffling to fight back the tears. The Coach said he wanted to say thanks and wanted to us to know we were part of his family.

When he finished with the last player, the coach said a short prayer and walked back to the locker room. There was no practice that day. We didn’t need one.

On Thanksgiving we creamed Saint John’s. There was no way they could have beaten us. We were an emotional juggernaut. The Red Army would have been crushed by Brooklyn Prep if it had faced us on the field.

That night and the next day, there were wild parties everywhere. When I went back to the school to drop off my equipment for the last time, there was Coach sitting alone in his office listening to a replay of the TV audio that a parent had taped. Tears were streaming down his face.

Twenty-five years later, not only did I use the black knit ski cap as a symbol, I laid out a vision for Cleveland of how we would end the year as number one and how we would go about doing it. When the district went into the final three months of the year, I still had the hat when I convened a final review of the prospects for the remaining year and what we still needed to do. I went around the room and thanked each person for his or her unique contribution to our success to that point. My teams left the room, and at the end of the year we were number one.

Thanks, Coach Duffy.

Dealing with The Kinks in Kinko’s Vision

The red towel taught me that if you can’t see the vision you probably won’t live the vision. When I walk into a business for the first time, I’m looking for the vision all around me. I can see it in the demeanor and attitude of the employees, the layout of the facility, and the decorations on the wall.

I was in a specialty printing operation not long ago that offered a classic example. Bear in mind that the firm probably brings in about $18 million a year in revenue. Not mammoth, but far more than a mom-and-pop store. The reception area was empty when I arrived and it stayed empty throughout my visit. When I say empty, there wasn’t even a receptionist on duty. The welcome desk was abandoned and the phone console sat there blinking forlornly.

The walls were dingy and in need of a paint job. There wasn’t a picture of a human face, nor a display of products, awards, or marketing material. I hardly noticed the company’s logo. When I penetrated farther into the complex, the atmosphere became even more bland and unexciting. I wondered if a neutron bomb had gone off and wiped out the people. They certainly weren’t to be seen in the common areas or the hallways.

I was there as the ultimate customer. I was exploring the possibility of buying the business. There was no mystery about why it was for sale. The place was lifeless. After thirty seconds or a minute, an untrained eye could describe the firm’s vision—ho-hum. I didn’t have to embark on due diligence to know that the company was in need of a serious fix up.

Any customer walking through the front door would recognize the operation for what it was. Low performance, low quality, low value, and low people-ology have an unmistakable aura. Another printing business, one you’re probably familiar with, comes to mind and offers another example of how we live our vision, whether we know it or not, in large and small ways: Kinko’s. While I was working on this book, I needed some quick copies. I went into Kinko’s close to my home in Columbus, walked to the counter, said hello to the woman on duty, asked how she was, and, getting no response, requested a card to activate a machine. Without looking up, she flipped it at me. I went to a copier and it didn’t work (ask me about copiers that don’t work—I dare you). I waited, I waved for help, I smiled, I fidgeted, and finally I walked back to the woman and said politely, “You’re going to be in my book.” She looked up.

“Really?” she said with genuine interest.

I nodded. “This is the first time you’ve bothered to acknowledge that I’m alive, or even look at me. I’m never coming back to Kinko’s—and you will be in the book,” and I walked out. I now go to Staples instead. My coauthor, Roger Gittines, still uses Kinko’s because he’s mad at Staples for the same reasons. We’re not going to take it anymore. I fired Kinko’s; he fired Staples. We fired them because our experience as customers told us all we needed to know about vision. What we saw—or didn’t see—was:

• leadership
• process
• consistency
• care
• execution

Vision is nothing more—and nothing less—than a promise. We promise to live and do business based on a set of higher values. Maybe your Kinko’s or Staples does better keeping its promises. I hope so. But go out and fire somebody who doesn’t deliver on their vision. Don’t take it anymore.

Good Words, Bad Deeds

People make or break a vision. The woman at my Kinko’s surely did. So does the manager in another store who sits chatting on the phone in a glass walled office overlooking the gridlocked checkout area and does nothing about opening another cash register; he’s also a vision-breaker.

While I’m picking fights with national chains, I’ll tell you about my experience at Circuit City during one Christmas shopping season. My wife,

Julie, and I decided it was time for a new stereo system after years of putting up with one that was long past its prime. However, neither of us knows much about stereos. We went to Circuit City, making a beeline for the room in the back of the store that is set up to demonstrate the tweeters and woofers and receivers and what have you. We walked in and music was blasting out of the speakers. Hey, that’s what we came for! I looked around and there were two employees sitting side by side on a coach jiving away. They loved it. I caught their attention and said, “Great sound!” They nodded and stayed in the groove of the music, shaking their shoulders and wiggling their heads to the beat. We waited. They jived. We waited. They jived. Then we left.

Is that vision? Yeah, Circuit City was living its vision at that moment. It’s was a vision that encompassed training, recruiting, leadership, motivation, and discipline. Like all visions it was the sum total of the existing—living—culture.

And that’s why Julie and I walked out.

Now I fully expect to hear from Circuit City, Kinko’s, and Staples (though Staples should take up their beef with Roger). And I’ll probably get irate calls from America West Airline and Compaq, who will be held up to critical analysis later in the book. What I’ll probably hear is that I’m being unfair to them based on isolated incidents involving a few employees who don’t represent the high levels of professionalism shown by the vast majority.

Okay. Sounds reasonable. What happens next though, is the true test of vision, and you and I will see the results—or the lack of results—in the future. Customer complaints that are acted upon with a New York nod and its West Coast equivalent, the L.A. shrug, reveal how a company lives its vision. I have never examined Kinko’s vision or mission statements, or those of the other companies I just mentioned. Maybe they don’t have them, for all I know. But what they do have, and it’s the same thing, is a companywide culture that reflects certain values and actions that support them.

We know you by your deeds, not your words.

Rollout a Vision Renewal

What I’d recommend to Kinko’s or any company with a vision that may be showing signs of being lived down rather than lived up, is to call a time-out. Take five days to check the vital signs of your vision to see if it’s living or dying.

By putting the vision blueprint on a five-day track, I’ve created a sense of urgency and given it an action orientation. As a leader, I am always concerned about complacency and drift. When you do it often enough, every job, including a high-wire act without a net, becomes routine. This blast of energy created by a vision renewal campaign gets people out of their ruts. Normal business can still continue, but it will have a different dynamic and more zest.

Sure, people may grumble about the extra work and pressure. But if you look for ways to keep the emotion levels high, they’ll breeze right through it. Think of the occasions when you said, “Boy, the time flew right by. I hardly realized hours had past.” That means you were in a state of flow; in the groove. What we’re looking for here is an atmosphere that will induce flow and the exhilaration that accompanies it. Deadline pressure alone, however, doesn’t necessarily guarantee a state of flow. People have to be emotionally committed to and confident in their work and the outcome. A living vision can give them that confidence.

Even if your vision looks, feels, smells, and tastes healthy and fresh, it pays to periodically launch a vision and mission renewal program modeled after the one I’ve just laid out. Vision can go greenish-gray and moldy overnight. There’s a tendency to take it for granted, which guarantees that it will lose effectiveness. Some people will groan and say, “No, not vision again!”

Yes, vision again. All actions, all policies must constantly be related back to vision and the mission statement, and it has to happen at all levels from the board room to the loading dock. If this isn’t happening constantly, a vision renewal will help get you back on track. The cynics may not like it, but if the vision is genuine they will be in the minority. Cynicism is a product of disillusionment. A living vision is the antidote. The energy, electricity, and emotion it generates will jump-start the whole enterprise. But you have to go “do” the vision, and keep doing it after the renewal exercise. It won’t happen by itself.

Yellow Submarines and Purple Hearts

Not long ago I was on hand for Nortel Network’s yearly mission and vision relaunch and was impressed by the simplicity and directness of their message. Essentially, it was this—Why you, the employee, should choose Nortel so you can help our customers choose us.

There were a thousand people in the room. Exciting images flashed from huge video display screens. An MTV-style collage of customer testimonials helped build the excitement level. There was a preview of the new TV ad campaign. Yet there were only five speakers; each one hammered away at the basic people-oriented message.

You can do the same thing. Make the meeting as exciting as your resources will allow. Can’t afford custom-made videos? How about a $15 music CD? Don’t forget our earlier discussion—music is pure emotion. Nortel, it turns out, knows this too. In 1999, the telecommunications giant launched a marketing campaign to emphasize its goal of capturing a leadership position at the heart of the Internet revolution. Its theme was “Come Together,” after the song from the Beatles’ famous Abbey Road album, and the tune rock ‘n’ rolled nationwide under Nortel’s ads on shows like Chicago Hope and 60 Minutes.

Come together. Wow!

The corporation’s CEO and vice chairman, John Roth, also proved he believes in emotional Pacetta-fication by sending out a letter to the corporation’s 75,000 employees announcing that, in conjunction with the campaign, “we are involved in an all-out war on the competitive front.”¹

My kind of guy—the Beatles and the bomb.

But Mr. Roth needs to remember that those are fighting words. And that, forever more, he and Nortel will be judged by how they actually fought the war and whether it was won, lost, or ended in a draw. Vision is a powerful weapon as long you don’t shoot yourself in the foot with it.