Leaders are responsible for the culture, team, mission, alignment, and vision.  No organization will realize and sustain excellence without the right vision.

What is vision?  It is a clear and compelling picture of the future that organizations can make into their reality.  It shows the organization and everyone outside of it this is who we can become and what we can do.  It instructs and inspires.  It is known, understood, believed, and acted upon as intended.

It challenges the organization to accomplish something which is truly consequential.  The result could be the team of scientists who invent a breakthrough technology, the company who becomes the leader of the industry, or the local government who wins a national award for innovation.

The vision must be research-based and data-driven.  It has to be the product of a keen understanding of the organization and its environment.  It reflects the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the organization.  It is aspirational and difficult yet practical and possible.

The organization and operations must be structured and engineered to attain it.  Anyone observing the personnel, policies, procedures, technology, facilities, equipment, culture, teamwork, and production process of the organization should be able to identify the vision.  It should drive everything that is done and why and how it is done.  It must permeate the culture and explain who is and stays on the team.  To achieve the vision will require patience, long term discipline, mistakes, setbacks, innovative thinking and effective problem-solving, hard work, and dedication.

For exceptional leaders, it is all about the vision and never about them.  It is what gets them up in the morning and keeps them thinking late at night.

Having the right vision or lacking it determines our destiny as leaders and organizations.  The wrong vision can lead to disaster.  Lacking one also ensures failure.  Proverbs 29:18 tells us, “Where there is no vision, the people perish…”  Vision is the oxygen and fuel which animates and drives greatness (Abrashoff, 2002; Blanchard, 2011; Drucker, 2001; Grant, 2017; Kotter, 2012; Lencioni, 2012; Maxwell, 1998; Welch, 2005).

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