“Vision without execution is hallucination.” — Thomas Alva Edison

Executing Your Vision

Vision and mission lead to high quality action

I like to call this the “dual challenge” of an organization. First, you have to come up a vision. Now, I’m not sure if any of us recall the last time that you just sat down and “came up with a vision”, but it’s not like baking bread or assembling a piece of IKEA furniture. It’s much more like making a beautiful painting or writing elegant prose. It comes from within and it’s sustained through continued thought and focus. All of these are not easy in and of themselves, but day by day, you can craft a great vision.

Second, you have the execution of that vision. When you ask CEOs “what keeps them up at night”, you will find on many surveys, stated in similar language, “consistent execution of strategy by top management” as one of the top concerns across the globe and in any size business.

In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, Mark Hurd, the CEO of HP citied the aforementioned quote about vision, execution and hallucination as he explained that many companies fail not from a lack of vision, but from an inability to clearly translate vision into executable plans and then follow through with concrete action. Knowing what you need to do, on its own, does not guarantee success. You have to be able to:

1. Deconstruct what you know (the vision) in to measurable objectives and focus on crystallizing the ‘essence’ of these objectives.
2. Chalk out business processes that center around this essence.
3. Have the right infrastructure in place so as to be able to define, track, and continuously measure and refine the processes that your organization will need to follow in order to exceed business objectives.

It’s really about writing it up, chunking it down and working on it every _ single _ day. The best go no more than 3 or 4 days without reviewing and focusing on their vision and purpose. I find that if I, for whatever reason, get away from this habit of focusing on my vision and working on executing it, the business suffers and my results suffer.

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

What are you doing today to execute on the vision that you’ve set for yourself or your organization? What more could you be doing?

PLANNING AHEAD?

Each week, we look at what’s coming up a month from now in Chase’s 2010 Calendar of Events to help you plan your promotions in advance.