What’s Next for You and Your Business?

A new truss/panel plant, a branch store, a stand-alone showroom, a new delivery truck, new products or product lines, a contribution to a local charity, new customer charge account, employee pay increases, association golf outing…?

How will you decide?

Some business leaders smoothly navigate the turbulent waters of important and urgent opportunities swirling around them at any given time. 

How do they do it?

They have a clear and compelling vision of where they and their business are going.  Based on this vision, they have:

• Identified their values
• Developed a mission to turn their vision into reality
• Created a values-based strategy to accomplish their mission, and
• Communicated clearly and consistently their vision, values, mission and strategy to all stakeholders (families, employees, vendors, customers, communities, etc.)

 Each opportunity, challenge, success and failure is viewed through the lense created by this vision.  Opportunities aligned with their vision flow to them.  Unaligned opportunities do not.

Why is this?

They’ve made sharing and enrolling stakeholders in their vision a primary leadership activity.  Stakeholders clearly understand and share their vision.  As a result, they actively seek aligned opportunities and sift out non-aligned.

For example, committed vendors pursue products likely to help achieve a vision they share.  The products these vendors present are already filtered through the lense of the vision.  Imagine vendors, employees, customers and even your family members constantly on the alert for the best products to help reach your vision.  Wouldn’t inventory management be a breeze?

Now, imagine those same stakeholders watching for safety and security problems; searching for new employees, sources of funding, available properties, innovative material handling equipment, work process improvements and new customers…all for you and your business.  Wouldn’t this steady stream of aligned options and opportunities make reaching your vision easier?

Visionary leaders aim for full commitment to maximize stakeholder synergy.  How well are you sharing your vision?  How turbulent are the “seas of opportunity” you’re navigating?

Recognize this vision?

 “… that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun…and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out…”