Excerpt

Keeping on Track, taken from Chapter 2

You might think of your business as a small sailboat that you will crew with your staff and use to cross a wide bay – a bay so wide, in fact, that the opposite shore is out of sight. Your desire on setting out is to arrive at a precise point on that far shore which you believe holds the promise of a magnificent bounty for you and your crew.

You know that your small craft will be subject to the vagaries of the wind, the pull of the currents in the bay, and the surging of the tides. As a seasoned sailor, you accept that you will have to sail through mists and fog, storms and high seas, and you will appreciate that being a sailing boat, you will seldom have the luxury of being blown before the wind directly towards your destination, and will spend most of your time zigzagging as you tack with the winds of the moment.

With such a journey ahead of you, it would be a truly huge advantage for everyone engaged in sailing your good ship Enterprise, if there just happened (by sheer luck, mind you) to be a tall and powerful lighthouse right at your destination!

If there were, it would not matter what forces of nature assailed you on your journey, how fiercely you were buffeted by winds or strongly drawn by currents. It would not matter how dark or overcast it was so long as, periodically, you or your crew could catch a flash of the powerful beacon at your destination and check to ensure that whatever you were doing at the moment was contributing to your progress towards it.

Creating your Vision for your business is akin to erecting a tall and powerful lighthouse at your desired destination before you set out on your journey.

Without continual reference to your beacon, you run the risk of being blown off course, of losing your way, of never making it.

You might now understand why we insist that, “Creating the Vision is one of the key responsibilities of the Leader,” and you'll see shortly why it is one of the key steps in Solving the People Puzzle.