On Strategy: Vision Beyond Vision

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Sometimes - when it’s really done right - an organization’s vision becomes far more than its purpose as a guide and direction of travel.  It becomes an individual purpose.  A way of life.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal hosted their D6 Conference on All Things Digital.  If you were listening, you not only heard what’s next, but you also learned why we are where we are - and how it doesn’t even scratch the organizational and societal surface of where we’re going and what we can expect next.

This wasn’t about “all things digital.”  It was about all things possible.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, told the story about the call he received from his friend and former semi-roommate while Ballmer was at Stanford Business School. The caller, a Harvard drop-out, asked Ballmer to to leave his chosen trajectory - which would have netted unquestionable success - and join him in a start-up that had as good as no track record in a market that, at that time, didn’t exist. 

Smart man that he is, Ballmer asked Bill Gates, “Why would I leave Stanford to join you?” to which the iconic Gates responded, in part, with his iconic vision: “Because we’re going to put a computer on every desk and in every home.”

Two days later, Ballmer left Stanford and made his way to Redmond, Washington.

But the rest isn’t history.  That was just the beginning.  That’s the way vision really works.

Because, a few years ago, when Gates and Ballmer recognized that they had as good as achieved their initial vision - twenty-something years later - they updated and expanded it.  Now, Microsoft’s vision is that there is no area of anyone’s life - personal or professional, at home, in your office, in your car, on the phone…no area - that Microsoft software, products or services will not touch.

That’s a vision that doesn’t end - not just because of the products and services it creates.  It’s because, in listening to Ballmer, you still hear that sense of excitement, of all things possible, that captured his imagination all those years before.

People like to talk about John F. Kennedy’s vision that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade - the 1960s - as the hallmark of what a vision can and should be.

It worked.  There’s no question about that.  In fact, the people involved brought it in early and beautifully when the lunar module landed in the Sea of Tranquility in 1969.

The real question is, why did it work?  What did Kennedy’s vision do to hook the attention - the dreams - of the people who became involved and kept them committed from that time forward?