Mark W. Johnson - Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking Into Breakthrough Growth

LEAD FROM THE FUTURE

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Proverbs 29:18

Everyone recognizes a great, visionary leader when they see oneat least in retrospect, after their prescient ideas have been borne out by time. In history, Winston Churchill inspired the British in their darkest hour, and Nelson Mandela led the resistance to apartheid from his prison cell on Robben Island. Visionary industrial-age titans like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Kiichiro Toyoda, and, in our own day, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos recognized the transformative power of new technologies and leveraged them to build vast enterprises that changed whole economies and ways of life. Each of these leaders looked past the conventional wisdom of their day, foresaw a different and better world, and mobilized others to join them in their quests to create it.

Where did their vision come from? By what alchemy, besides sheer force of intellect, personality, and determination, did they bring them to life? Visionary business leaders, we are told, are usually entrepreneurs who build their organizations from scratch; rarely, if ever, are they found at established organizations. Most, we have been led to believe, are creatures we can only admire and never hope to emulate, who are gifted with a mysterious power of second sight that lets them see opportunities where others cannot.

That is not what we think. As business strategists who specialize in helping firms navigate disruptive change and develop future-oriented growth strategies, we have learned that visionaries are simply flesh-and-blood human beings who have figured out how to develop actionable views of their organizations best possible futuresviews that are clear-eyed, inspiring, and granular enough that they can be operationalized, which is to say, directly linked to an explicit strategic path that starts in the here and now. We believe that the ability to develop and then actualize such a vision is a criticalperhaps the criticalexecutive skill, though it is sorely neglected in traditional management doctrine.

When he was a young man, Apples Steve Jobs experimented with LSD and lived in an ashram in India. Were not going to tell you that we have a formula that will allow you to do all the things that he didat the beginning, in that fabled garage in Los Altos, and years later, when he transformed Apple into the giant enterprise that it is today. But we can tell you that you dont have to take mind-altering drugs to become more visionary.

Developing and deploying an inspiring and actionable vision is a skill that can be learned. Beyond that, it can be driven into the cultures of even the most hidebound organizations, reigniting their entrepreneurial fires and infusing them with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.