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The Hazards Of A Vague Leadership Vision

Leading at Light Speed is a groundbreaking leadership book by Eric Douglas describing the 10 Quantum Leaps which build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization. Quantum Leap #2 is about how to Sharpen the Focus.

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There is a preference for some leaders to shy away from fully focusing because they think that it hinders them from grasping opportunities. But when vision is clearly missing, trust follows. Burning issues remain ignored. Politics have the tendency to be considered before performance. Bureaucracy hinders forward thinking. There is a negative ripple effect when there is no presence of leadership. Here’s one example:

For nearly 100 years, Sears Roebuck was the greatest catalog retailer in the world. It exemplified innovation and customer service. As the outcome, its financial sector aligned. Then in the early 1980s, Sears started to diversify into higher-margin, unrelated financial services in order to boost its stock price. Its vision became muddied. It appeared to be the leader in low price marketing? It has the potential to become a pioneer in catalog marketing – which will place it in a comfortable situation in e-commerce? No, its vision was to make more money.

Because its vision was primarily financial, Sears lost sight of its catalog and retail business. Wal-Mart and others came along and created retail alternatives in rural areas. Through innovations of their own, they found ways to improve margins and create greater profits. Once that occurred, Sears’ vaunted combination of service, quality, and pricing started to crumble. It became just another retailer – and in the process lost billions of dollars in shareholder value.

When the strategic focus is understood:

People embrace change and adapt their jobs accordingly.
People measure themselves by how well they and their teams perform.
People take initiative.
People were not afraid to come forward with pressing issues and present them in a public forum.
Morale is high, and turnover is correspondingly low.

When the strategic focus is not understood:

People lack energy or motivation to change.
People measure themselves by achieving tasks – or not at all.
Peoples’ reactions intensify.
There is hesitancy to bring issues or raise eyebrows on current events.
The tendency for low morale and high turnover is prevalent.

Another example of fuzzy vision is America Online (AOL). Steve Case, the founder of AOL, initially wanted to change the way people accessed and absorbed information. In the early 1990s, AOL was battling Prodigy and CompuServe for dominant share of the online information business. The merger with Time-Warner was seven years away. During the next six years, AOL shot up progressively in growth. Case built partnerships with information providers, grew subscribers, and extolled the importance of “content communities.At the height of the earliest dot com hype in 2000, AOL acquired Time-Warner. Steve Case rose to the ranks of a billionaire.

But then came the fall.Unintentionally with the unification with Time Warner, AOL lacked its edge and prominence as the best internet information provider. It instead tried to build shareholder value through marketing partnerships. It tried to become an online advertising juggernaut, selling advertising packages that annoyed subscribers and provided little or no value to the consumer or to the buyer of the ad.

AOL’s vision became vague when the collaboration with Time Warner didn’t develop according to plans. In and out came talent. the world wide web lost its effect. AOL relegated to the unscrupulous behavior of deceptive revenue reporting. The stock price dropped drastically. Case was forced out. The year 2009 marked the remaining chapter in one of history’s worst company mergers when Time-Warner detached from AOL – it served as a symbol of an ambiguous plan.

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Chris Anderson: New business models in the digital information economy

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