Afford Anything - How to Lead with a Vision, with Michael Hyatt

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

#259: Leadership comes in all forms. Whether you’re a small business owner, a manager or department head at work, or the head of a volunteer organization, having a crystal clear vision is critical to success. Without a clear vision, you’re likely to stumble along a path that leads to nowhere -- or worse, a dead end. Wouldn’t it be better to have an idea of where you’re going? Michael Hyatt, a prolific bestselling author on the topics of business and leadership, shares the pitfalls of not having a vision and 10 ways to nail down a solid vision that will lead you to the path you want to be on. Check out bonus resources: http://visiondrivenleader.com/afford Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that applies not just to how you manage your money, but how you manage anything in life that is a limited resource, such as your time, your energy, your focus, your attention. Every yes-to-one thing is an implicit no to something else. And so how do you, first, decide what matters most, and second, align your daily decisions around that?

How do you keep from having priorities that are so scattered, that you end up underserving yourself, your community, your potential. Answering these questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and today Michael Hyatt joins us to discuss the importance of having a crystal clear vision. Michael Hyatt is a prolific author on the topics of business and leadership. His books have appeared on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.

He is the founder and CEO of a leadership training company called Michael Hyatt & Company, and he is the former chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. He joins us to talk about how having a crystal clear vision can improve your odds of success in any organization in which you are a leader, whether that's a side hustle or a small business that you run, whether that's a team or a department or a project at work, including if you work for a large organization, or whether that's through a community group or a church group or a nonprofit organization, any activity that requires leadership requires vision. And we in this upcoming interview are going to discuss why vision matters and how you can

cultivate and articulate a clear vision which will help you reach your goals. During this interview, we're going to discuss a lot of questions that you should ask yourself as you're setting these goals. he's going to share advice about how to create a clear and compelling written script. And he is generously offering a bunch of free resources like quizzes and worksheets and videos. So for the things that we discuss in this interview, he is offering those resources for free to anyone in the Afford Anything community who enjoys this upcoming interview and who orders his book. All of those resources are available at visiondrivenleader.com slash afford. Again, a ton of free resources at visiondrivenleader.com slash afford.

So with that said, here's Michael Hyatt discussing the importance of articulating and refining a clear vision within your job, within your business, within your community groups, and for your life. Hi, Michael. Hey, Paula. Michael, you've written about vision, and you call Vision a top predictor of success. What is vision and how does it differ from mission and strategy? Yeah, I think it's important to get these two things clear because a lot of times people confuse these or use them almost as synonyms. Basically, mission defines what a business is. And vision describes where it's going.

Or another way to say that is that vision answers the question, where are we going? Where's the destination? And mission really answers the question, why? You know, why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing here? Vision is out there where we're moving toward. mission is usually brief, like you hear of a mission statement, but a vision, sometimes people talk about vision statements, but I have a much more robust kind of framework that I call a vision

script, a three to five, you know, page document that really describes a future state of your business that's superior to the present, but it's written in the present tense as though it's already happened, and it describes a bigger, better, more desirable reality. Would it be accurate to say that vision is essentially a present tense, as though it's already happened, and it describes, a fleshed-out articulated statement of where you're going in X interval in the future, whether that's one year, five years, 10 years? Yes, exactly. I mean, essentially what you're doing is as a leader, you're taking a step into the future.

Like, let's just say three years for the sake of argument. You step into the future three years. And then you describe what you see. And in kind of my framework inside the book, the vision-driven leader, I talk about a four-part framework where we talk about the future of the team because the team is the primary means by which you bring this vision into reality. So the team is all important. Then the future of the product, whether that's actually a service or a physical product or a

digital product or whatever it may be, but the future of the product, what does that look like in three years? The future of your sales and marketing, how do you go to market, how you try to reach people, what does your marketing look like? And then finally, the future of your impact. What are the objective measurable impacts that you want to have on the world? That could be revenue, it could be profit, it could be downloads, it could be web visits, it could be any kind of criteria, but it's the impact that you're going to have on the world. Now, if a person runs their own business, if you're a small business owner, then you have the autonomy and authority to be able to create a vision for your company because it's yours.

What do you do if you work for an employer, but you perhaps head a small team? how can you, or can you, bring vision to the pocket of work that you do inside of a much larger framework? Yeah, it's critically important for every leader, no matter where you find yourself, you know, in the food chain, to be responsible for the vision of the entity over which you preside. Because if you think about it, a leader is going somewhere. I mean, the very notion of leading presumes that you're going somewhere and people are following you to that somewhere. But if you don't know the destination, you're just kind of going for a walk. And that's the problem with so many organizations, even departments within a larger corporation

or a division within a larger corporation. If there's not a vision there, people can be very busy doing a lot of work, but they're not building towards something because the leader hasn't taken the time to define the vision. So I first learned this and first started applying this back when I myself was a divisional manager, general manager of one division in a large corporation that had 14 divisions. And so I was given responsibility in this large book publishing company for turning this division around. And I reported the CEO was like three levels above me. So I was this small division.

And it was the worst performing division in the entire company. It was dead last when it came to revenue growth. It was dead last when it came to profitability. In fact, we'd lost money the previous year. And the CEO asked me to meet him. He said, how long is it going to take you to turn this division around? I didn't really have a clue. but I picked the number out of the air.

I said, well, I think about three years. And he said, well, that's kind of what I was thinking to, which, you know, thankfully, I named the right number. And so the first thing I did was I got together by financials, got together the organizational chart, and because this was a book publishing company, I got together at my publication schedule, and I just went off by myself for a half a day. And I said, okay, what is it that I want to see at the end of this three years? What is this division look like that's different from now,

that's superior to the present, and how can I describe it in the present tense? So I started writing it down as a series of bullets. So one of the things I said, for example, is I said, we publish five New York Times bestsellers a year. Now, at the time, we weren't publishing any bestsellers. But I was envisioning a time when that was a reality when we were publishing five New York Times bestsellers per year. Another bullet that I wrote down, I said, our team maximizes their bonus potential. They earn out their full bonuses every year because I knew that if my people had a financial stake in the outcome, that they would be much more likely to be engaged and help me turn this division around. Well, long story short, I ended up with about 10 bullets, went back with that vision script. And then I sat down with my leadership team.

It was a pretty small division. We had about 30 people in the division. So I had about four people that made up my leadership team. And I said, hey, guys, I've been thinking about the future. And I've kind of sketched out some thoughts. And, you know, I'm not Moses coming down from the mountain. This isn't the Ten Commandments. This is just kind of me trying to get a handle on a better future that we could create together.

And I really need your help to make this better, to tweak it. There's probably things I've missed, probably things that need to be tweaked. But let's begin a conversation about what that could look like. So we did. So once we had alignment on that, then we rolled it out to the entire team. Well, here it was a cool thing. It didn't take us three years to turn that division around. We went from number 14 to number one in revenue growth and in profit margin in 18 months.

So a year and a half, half the time that it took, which proved to me it accelerates progress toward it. It really drives execution. So, no, you don't have to be the solopreneur or the business owner or the CEO. Anywhere you're leading, you've got to have a vision if you're going to lead effectively. How would this apply in non-career or non-business context? If you are an active volunteer for a community organization or for a church or for a local nonprofit, in what ways could the importance of leading by stating, creating a clear vision, in what ways could that be applied in those contexts?

Yeah, well, it absolutely can be applied in that context. I have a business coaching program called Business Accelerator. We have about 450 clients in that program. A lot of them are business owners, but we have pastors, nonprofit leaders, leaders in education, you know, professors. We have people that are in the military, just a little bit of everybody. And we all start with vision because we think that's critically, critically important. Because again, you're trying to lead.

You kind of got to define the win. What is it we're building toward? It's like last year we added this, we had a big den project, adding a den onto the back of our house. And one way to do that would just be to go to Home Depot and load up on lumber and nails and sheet rock and just come back. and start building. But that would have been a monstrosity. So instead, we started with an architect. We gave him kind of our vision. He helped us flesh it out and get clear on it. Then we met with

the contractor. And then we had alignment between me as the owner of the home, the architect, and the contractor. So that as they began to build, there were no surprises built in. We all know what we were trying to build toward. And when they finished it in January of this year right now, it was magnificent. It was better than I expected. But it was because we started with a clear vision and a clear plan of what it was we were trying to build. And that's the same in any organization, whether it's for-profit, non-profit, military, whatever it is. You've got to have a vision of what you're trying to create. Is vision different than goals or dreams, or could these be used synonymously? Well, you can define them any way you want, but let me tell you how I define them.

I think the dream is kind of the broadest but most ambiguous kind of vision of the future. You know, you have this dream, but it's not been reduced to words. It's just kind of in your heart, in your thinking, you're kind of imagining something out the future. And that's where it always has to start. So there's nothing wrong with dreaming. Dreaming is a good thing. And in fact, one of the things I find with business owners, in particular, leaders in general,

is they have to be given permission to dream again. Because for some reason, it feels like a waste of time. But it's not. It's critically important. It's the beginning of the creation and the innovation process. But then that dream has to be reduced to a value. vision, a three to five year vision. And the thing that distinguishes a vision from a dream is that it's written down. So you're going to write this down in a three to five page document. And I get

very specific in the vision driven leader on exactly how to do that. Those four sections I mentioned a moment ago, but you write that down. Now from your vision, you're going to reduce that to annual goals. So at Michael Heiding Company, the company that I founded in lead, every year we have a strategic planning process. I did this even when I was, you know, a divisional manager, even before that, when I was leading a marketing department at a bigger company. But I did a strategic planning retreat with my key leadership and we would sit down and we would look at the vision first. Then we'd say, okay, what are the goals, you know, the seven to ten goals that we want to have this year that are going to move us toward making that vision a reality. But it doesn't stop there. And this is kind of

the missing linkage because you've got to go all the way down to daily actions. So then, from those annual goals, you want to divide those up so that you have no more than two to three goals per quarter. Now, all the best goal achievement research, and I've written an entire book on goal achievement, called your best year ever, but the best goal achievement research says that you can really not focus on more than two to three goals per quarter. So then those three goals per quarter are going to reduce further to what are the two or what are the two to three, and I like to think of it as three, but three outcomes this week. I call this the weekly big three. And then finally, today, when I get up, what can I do today? What are my daily big three that are going to move me in the direction of achieving that goal or accomplishing an important project?

So that creates the linkage that drives execution because so often people come up with a vision or they come up with goals and then they don't happen because they're not driving them from an execution perspective from their daily actions. Does that make sense? That absolutely makes sense. I want to go back to the comment that you made about goals, a lot of the research shows that two to three goals per quarter is the optimal amount. Does that apply only inside of a work context? So, for example, could you have two to three goals per quarter within your work? And then perhaps two to three goals per quarter within your personal life. Maybe you want to improve your physical fitness or you want to move across the country. Yeah, this is tough. You might not like this answer, but two to three goals overall. Now, when I encourage my coaching clients, I say, look, your life is a seamless whole.

Work and life flow together. You really can't focus on more than two to three per quarter. Typically how it looks for me, sometimes it might be three work goals. Sometimes it may be two work goals and a personal goal. Sometimes, like in the summer, it may be two personal goals and a work goal. But again, this can cascade through an organization. So as an overall company, for example, in our company at Michael Hyden Company, we have 10 goals for 2020. Okay, now as the CEO, I'm kind of the owner of those goals in a sense, but they're divided up among different people.

So I don't take responsibility for all 10 of those goals, like our chief marketing officer may have a couple, our chief product officer may have a couple and so on so that there's ownership. Every goal has an owner. But that's not the only goal they're working on because there'll be goals that'll be specific to their division or their department or even their personal life that don't apply to the larger group. And so that's the way it cascades down through. So once a quarter, we get together as an entire company. We do some training for half a day. And then we get together and we do our goal planning for the next quarter. And so we reaffirm the corporate goals for the next quarter, what we're shooting for

the next quarter. And again, that's always three. And then the thing that we do from there is then each department breaks out and they identify the three goals that are going to dovetail up into those corporate goals. And then it goes all the way down to the individual. But at some point, when it gets down to the individual, you know, we want to make room so that they can pursue some personal goals as well. How broad or narrow should those goals be?

Certainly, if stated in a way that is too broad, it almost becomes a loophole of the two to three. But if stated in a way that is too narrow, it could be undercutting your potential. How do you find that balance? Well, the key I think is to adhere to what I call in my book, Your Best Year Ever, the smarter goal framework. So they've got to be specific. They've got to be measurable. They've got to be achievable. They've got to be, you know, all these different attributes, but they've got to be specific so that you know when you've crossed the finish line.

And in fact, one of the things that's unique about that framework is I say they also have to be risky. Because when people say goals, there's a tendency, particularly in corporations to play it safe. You know, because people think, well, if I don't get it out there too far, I can't fail and I won't get in trouble if I don't get it. But again, all the goal achievement research basically says, that if the goal is not set in the discomfort zone, it won't command your focus. It won't ignite innovation. It won't keep you engaged in accomplishing the goal. So goals that just show an incremental improvement over a previous state are not really goals that are compelling. It's got to be in your discomfort zone. And that's true for the vision, too, by the way. In the discomfort zone,

the reason you know it's in the discomfort zone is the goal makes you uncomfortable. So you feel a little bit of fear. You feel some uncertainty. You're not quite sure the path of how to get there. You feel a little bit of doubt. Like maybe you don't have what it takes to lead and to get you to that endpoint. But that's exactly where you want it. That's what creates the innovation. That's what creates the focus. That's what creates and drives engagement. Now, you don't want it in the delusional zone. That's like zone. But you wanted it in your discomfort zone. So that's a little hack that's important. How do you develop the wisdom to know the difference between discomfort versus delusion? practice.

Practice. And I think also, you know, once you get them framed up, I think it's really helpful to run them by somebody that you really trust, somebody that's not a naysayer, but somebody that's really for you. You know, this is a great role of a coach or a mentor or even a close friend that, you know, has a growth mindset and who's going to encourage you to push and not allow you to kind of phone it in and do something that they know and you know is too easy, but something that's going to stretch you.

So running it by somebody else is great. I'll give you an example of that. Okay. So I had a personal trainer for a number of years. Great guy. He was a guy that after he read my book, he got really excited about setting goals. And he said to me, he said, okay, so like my number one goal for this next year is I want to make a million dollars in income. I said, okay.

You know, great. I mean, I don't care what the number is, but great. I said, how much money did you make last year? And he said, about $75,000. And I said, it might want to revisit that. I'm not saying you can't get to where you're earning a million dollars a year, but probably, that's probably going to be in your delusional zone for this first year. Right.

So let's throttle it back. So he did. Right. So in that context, would it make sense to anchor a goal based on current performance? So in the example that you just shared, if he made $75 this past year, then anchoring off of that and then doubling, let's say that the goal, a reasonable goal would be 150,000 in the next year. And it could continue to double until it reached a million. Well, this is more art than science. I mean, there's no one right way to do it. But I think it does require some thinking. And to ask yourself the question, you know, is it reasonable to think that I could

double my income this year? Yeah, it's going to stretch me, but I could see it if certain things happened, you know, that I could do that. So again, there's no right answer. But this is more more art than science, but the more you practice it, the more you do it, the more you get it right. But if you're not failing some, you're also not doing it right. So you've got to get comfortable with failure when it comes to goal setting or vision, because you want to stretch yourself to the point where there's some risk. And the risk is that you're not going to hit the goal. And so I would say, you know, for me, for any year when I have 10 goals on average, you know, there's probably going to be one or two that I'm not going to hit. Maybe I made 80% of the way there.

Maybe I made 90% of the way there, but that's okay. You can give yourself partial credit. This isn't a binary thing for you either made it or you didn't make it. The question is, are you making progress? Is the goal serving its function of helping you improve and move towards a bigger, brighter, better future? We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology.

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In your book, you describe being in your early 30s and lacking a clear vision and the way that that created a lot of friction inside of your business. Could you share that story? I can. So back in 1984, I started a book publishing company with a friend of mine. He'd been my boss in a couple different companies. And so we decided at that point that we were going to start our own business. And we got very excited about it because we thought, you know, we're going to be the captains of our fate.

We're going to create this amazing publishing company. And we were super excited about it. And we were, we had a great work ethic. So we were fortunate enough to be able to publish the biography of Oral Hersheiser straight out of the gate. And he was the pitcher for the Dodgers. And the Dodgers had won the World Series that that year. So, I mean, he was on everybody's lips. Everybody was familiar with him.

He was a household word. And we got to publish that book. It was amazing story how we got that, but we got it. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for seven months. And that produced a lot of cash and a lot of opportunity. And one of the things that you have to be careful of is as you become successful, you draw a lot of success or a lot of opportunities to yourself. But sometimes distractions show up on your doorstep masquerading his opportunities.

And without a vision, you don't really have a filter to know which is which. that's exactly what happened to us. So we thought, because we had all this cash and we had all this opportunity and people were coming to us, presenting opportunities to us, that we would get into children's books, we got into gift books, we got into reference books, we got into all kinds of books because we didn't have a vision of what the company was supposed to look like in the future. It'd almost be, to kind of go back to the metaphor I was using a little bit ago, if as long as building supplies kept showing up at the construction site, you just kept building. You know, there was no endgame toward which you were building.

Well, we eventually ran out of cash, not because we didn't have opportunities, not because we weren't successful, but our focus was fractured, was just spread too thin, our resources were spread too thin, and we just got cash starred. We were investing in too many opportunities. And so I really credit the failure of that company with a lack of vision. If we'd had a vision, we would have had a filter by which we could say no. We would have had the discipline to stay focused on. achieving that vision. And that story speaks to one of the six pitfalls that you name. In your book,

you described six pitfalls of lacking vision. And those scattered priorities are one of the six. Let's go over the six pitfalls. We've kind of touched on scattered priorities. So let's start with that one. Yeah. If you're not careful, if you don't have a vision, essentially what you end up with is anything that's an opportunity that in the moment seems good, you don't have any kind of criterion by which you can evaluate it and say, yes, this is part of the vision or no, this is outside of the scope of the vision. So the great thing the division does is it gives you a way to prioritize and even say no to those tasks or to those projects that are outside the scope of the vision. So yeah, it helps you prioritize what you're going to work on. And this is hugely important

for people who feel overwhelmed, for people who feel like they've got too much work to do. The great thing about having clarity around your vision is that it gives you. you the ability to say no. If you don't have that, then what happens? And I see this in a lot of companies, a lot of busy work, a lot of sideways energy, a lack of execution, although everybody's busy, because there's no clear vision to which, you know, they're moving. And so the great thing about having a vision is it gives you that ability to stay focused and do what's important. And so, for example, and I'll just use an illustration for my life, my business grew 62% last year, which was awesome. We've grown about that much every

year for the last three years. We've been on the Inc. 5,000 list of the fastest growing companies in America because of that. But here's the crazy thing. The crazy thing was I took 162 days off last year. My team never works, almost never works on the weekends or evenings. You know, we have a culture that frowns on working more than 40 hours a week. We find that when we have clarity of vision, we have focus. We're able to be super productive. Even in the middle of the COVID epidemic, One of the things that we noticed right after the first week is that people were trying to manage more than they'd ever managed before at home. You know, a lot of our young families had kids at home. You know, they're trying to homeschool their kids.

They're trying to keep up with their work. And we said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to go to a six-hour work day. We're going to work from nine to three every day. We don't want anybody working any more than that. First thing we noticed was people got more productive. But they were able to say no to the things that were outside the scope of the vision. And we've continued that practice.

You know, now we're in like week eight at the time we're recording this of the COVID pandemic. And we're still working six hours a day. We're still making progress towards our goals. The company's doing great. And in fact, we just announced to our team that we're going to continue this through the end of the summer. And maybe if it continues to work through the end of the year. Wow. So that's a powerful illustration of how having a clear vision allows you to say no to distractions masquerading as opportunities.

That's it. Let's talk about some of the other pitfalls of flacking vision, which slash advantages to having vision. One of the pitfalls that you name of not having vision is wasted money, wasted time, wasted talent. In what ways does that tend to express itself? Well, again, if you look back at the example of my publishing company, the publishing company that I founded, You know, we were spending a lot of money and dedicating a lot of resources to activities, to projects that just kind of we were excited about at the moment. But again, because they didn't fit into an overall vision, we weren't trying to create a specific outcome. It was just wasted energy.

And so the only way you can win in that kind of situation is just to get lucky. You know, you just get a few projects. It's almost like playing, you know, the lottery or something. You're just hoping that a couple projects hit so that it can cover your losses elsewhere. But if you consolidate your resources, if you focus on doing those things that are going to lead to bringing about that vision, just much more efficient. It's a much better stewardship of your resources to do it that way than to try to do it the other way. We've talked about distractions masquerading as opportunities, but the flip side of that is that lacking vision also causes you to miss opportunities. Can you talk about how that might happen?

Yeah, I give a couple of examples in that section of the book. I talk about compact computer company about Zappa. But Zappos is a good example of a company that didn't miss the opportunity. You know, they're a company that started in the shoe business. Everybody else said, there's no way you can do online shoes. I mean, how would people try on shoes? That could not possibly work. And by the way, it'd be too small of a market.

The people that could do that, that'd be too small of a market. And then they realized, no, actually, it could be a multi-billion dollar business. And Zappos was very successful at that, but they had a clear vision about what they wanted to do. and they pursued that opportunity with a vengeance. And there's a lot of companies out there that just, they miss opportunities. You know, I talk about kind of in another section there about Kodak, who missed an opportunity because they didn't have a clear vision of the future. They invented the first digital camera in 1975.

They could have launched it in 1992. But management couldn't imagine a future without film. They didn't have a vision of a future without film. So they didn't approve it. And as a result of that, another company, Fuji film came along, basically captured the entire film market, converted it to digital. They were so successful that Kodak, once the leader in that industry ended up going bankrupt. And they went bankrupt because the market converted to digital under them.

And even though they had invented the technology, their vision kept them from pursuing it. It strikes me with the Kodak example that this could open up a discussion about having the right vision. Because I would imagine that somebody from Kodak might say, well, Well, we did have a vision, but ours was a vision of a future that always had film, or we had a vision of a future that prioritized film. And that turned out to be simply the wrong vision of the future. It was. And I would say even more so, it might have been related to their mission. You know, they saw their mission. And I don't know what their mission statement was, but clearly from their behavior, they saw their mission somehow, you know, taking pictures on film.

And I think Fuji, on the other hand, saw that the role of photography was to preserve memories. And it wasn't tied to a specific technology. You know, how can I preserve visual representations of memories? And that's a completely different mission. That opens you up to all kinds of technology. So you never want to have a future. You never want to have a vision or a mission that depends upon a specific kind of technology. Because technology's constantly changing.

You know, it's like the old story about the people that were in the horse and buggy business, back when the car was invented. You know, they saw themselves as though in the horse and buggy business instead of the transportation business. If you're in the transportation business, then you're always open to new forms of technology that can do it more efficiently and more effectively. So the theme I hear between both of those examples is take a step back, make it broad, and that serves a bigger why, which allows you more flexibility in the how.

That's right. And I would also say, too, that what's important is that this is going to be something you're going to revisit on a frequent basis. So you don't have to get it 100% right out of the gate. You know, something is better than nothing. So to get a draft, to get something that's operational, it will begin to shape how you set your goals and how you proceed from quarter to quarter is great. But then once a year, and we do this once a year at Michael Heiding Company, we're in our strategic planning process, we revisit that vision and ask ourselves the question, does this still represent what we see in the future? Do we need to loosen it up and make it more broader? Do we need to tighten

it down to make it more specific, or is it about right? So we make a few tweaks every year, but as we go on, not that much tweaking, you know, the more mature we get. Now, our strategy is changing all the time because the strategy answers a question, how do we get here from here where we are to the destination that we have articulated in the vision script. So strategy can change, and particularly in the midst of the pandemic, everybody's strategy almost has changed. But the vision really shouldn't change. Even a crisis like this shouldn't force you to change your vision because, you know, it's, again, three to five years out. You mentioned that inside of your company, you said we create a vision and revisit every year. How many people within the company are

involved in this? And the reason that I ask that is for the people who are listening, who might lead a team or a department at work, they're not the CEO, but they have a managerial role within a a particular niche. Is this something that they should do and then express to the team, or should they loop people in and if so how many people? Yeah, well, first of all, you don't want too big a group and you don't want to really design it by committee. So when you're first starting and you don't have a vision script, I really recommend that the leader of whatever business unit that is gets alone by themselves for a half a day. Vision is not something you delegate. It's not something you can outsource. It's something that's got to start with you. What

you envision, what do you want for the entity over which you preside? Then you start, and I have a process that I call cascading communication where that leader is going to come back and begin to enroll the next level down. Now, if you don't have a next level down, if the next level down is everybody in your department, then you know, you probably want to share that with a trusted friend or a mentor or a coach. Just make sure that you haven't missed anything. But you never want anybody in the leadership between wherever you are in the organization and the front line, you never want anybody surprised. So you want them to feel like they've had a chance to speak into the creation of this vision. It's going to start as very wet cement. It's going to get a little bit more

firm as you move down the organization so that when you finally unroll it, yeah, you would still be open if somebody said, hey, but what about, you know, or you missed this? And maybe you did. But generally speaking, if the work of the leadership has done its role, it's going to be pretty buttoned up by the time that you roll it out to everybody. And then once a year, you ask about our company. Once a year in our company, our executive team does a strategic planning retreat, and that's about seven of us. And so we go off for a week and we do a lot of planning for the next year.

And that's all the way, not only from revisiting the vision, but also doing the goal setting, you know, our strategic priorities, all the tactical moves that we want to make all the way down to the budget. So all that's done in about a week period of time. But it starts with the vision. Let's talk about the 10 questions that you outline, 10 questions that can help any person who's listening to this shape that vision. Okay. Let's just go through them in order, starting with the first.

Are you a leader or a manager? Yeah, this is an important distinction, and there's been a lot of controversy and a lot of discussion about this in the leadership literature over the last several years. And I think leaders sometimes fancy themselves as the more important component and that if you're just a manager, you don't have a role. The truth is, leaders and managers are both important. And so the difference is that leaders create vision while managers execute on that vision. Leaders inspire and motivate, managers maintain and administer. Leaders take risks while managers control risks. Leaders stay focused on the horizon while managers have their eye on short-term goals and objectives.

And a great example of this is the difference between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. You know, for years, Tim Cook was the C-O. He was not the leader of Apple. And so Steve Jobs had the role. He's kind of the iconic leader, the iconic visionary, who reimagined all different kinds of things. The thing about Tim that was amazing is that he was the guy that also had vision in his role as a manager, but to streamline the supply chain, to pull out an efficiency, to get things done less expensively. I mean, he was really the brains. But I can remember when Steve Jobs passed away.

And there was all this conversation in the tech press in particular. And people were saying, no way that Tim Cook can lead that company. He is not Steve Jobs. Well, as it turns out, that was a role. That's not a personality. Tim Cook has done a phenomenal job leading Apple. He's not as charismatic of Steve, perhaps. But if you look at just the stock market performance, you know, it's been phenomenal.

he's tripled to value the company under his reign. He added way more value than Steve added. So he's a kind of leader, but he was able to step into that role of a leader. And I think for those that are listening and thinking, well, am I a leader or a manager? The difference? Vision. That's the difference. If you come up with a vision, that makes you a leader. It also gives people a reason to follow you. If you don't know where you're going, if you don't have a destination in mind, then how are you going to lead anybody anywhere? Can you be both a leader and a manager? I'm thinking about the people who are listening to this who have a side hustle or a side business, they are a sole proprietor, seems as though they would have to be both leaders and managers.

Totally, absolutely. That's why you can't denigrate the role of a manager. Most small businesses start out that way. Even some large businesses are that way. Sometimes people are uniquely gifted, but at some point in the evolution of a company, there's usually a diversion. Like even in my own company, I have a COO, we're not that big a company, we have 40 people, but at some point it made sense that I need to be the leader and the visionary. My oldest daughter happens to be our CIO. She's a terrific manager. She will eventually be the CEO. She'll step into that role and she'll do a great job at it. It's just kind of a divide and conquer sort of thing. If a person is listening to this, they're thinking to themselves, you know, I really feel like I am a manager. I feel like I'm just

focused on the day-to-day grind. I'm overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the day-to-day grind. I don't know where or how I could find the time to step back and cultivate that vision or cultivate that leadership. What can they do? The very first thing is to schedule time to get away and to dream. This is imperative. It's more important than you know because when you have clarity around a vision, it will conserve your resources. It will accelerate your progress. And you'll ensure that you end up with the results you're happy with because you've taken time to define the wind before you start. Otherwise, how do you know what to work on? I mean, everything becomes a priority. Everything becomes urgent. And there's always more work to do than you can get done. But if you have a vision,

now a sudden you've got a filter. It also becomes a very important component of the hiring process. How do you know who should be on the team or who should be outside of the team? Well, a vision is a great way to make sure that you get a cultural right fit. So the people that sign on to work with you are people that have signed on to go to the same destination. If there's not a destination to find, then, you know, how do you know if you got the right people or not? So it's very valuable in that sense, too. So question number two that you pose is what difference does vision make?

So let's move on to question number three, which is, what do you want? Yeah, you know, this is like the most important thing that any leader can ask. And it's hard to get to sometimes because sometimes we don't know what we want. And that's because we're so busy. We have so many distractions, so many interruptions that we rarely have the time to think about what we want. But to sit down and ask ourselves the question, what is it that we want to see in the future? I mean, if you don't know who does.

And by the way, you can do this in an organization where there's no vision at the top. When I came up with that vision for that division that I was running at Thomas Nelson Publishers, there was not an overarching vision. The CEO was a self-described non-visionary. In fact, when he finally got on board and said, oh, I need to have a vision, he delegated it out. So he was not a visionary. And yet, even within that organization, I could have a vision over that division, which I presided. But I had to get clear on what I wanted.

It has to start with you as the leader. And so getting clear, you know, scheduling that time, getting off, and coming up with a vision script is important. And we talked about the four components of a vision script. Just beginning to draft that. You know, there's power in writing things down. You know, you might have this sort of dream, this nebulous or ambiguous idea in your head. But I love this saying that says thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips. And there's huge value in just beginning to write down what I want in specific concrete terms.

What is it that I want? Like I said, I want five New York Times best sellers a year. I want all my team to maximize their bonuses. And I just wrote it down as a series of bullets and just did a brain dump. what I recommend. Don't worry about the polish. You can edit later, but just get it out of your head onto paper where you can begin to massage it and mold it. And sometimes it might be the case that you are surprised by what your own hands write. You are. Yes, I've certainly had that experience where my fingertips are moving and I have no idea what they're about to say. Yeah, it's so true.

And that's one of the values of writing. You go, wow, did I write that? Where did that come from? We'll come back to the show in just a second. But first, let's talk about question number four. Is it clear? Yeah, is it clear? This is important to because if you don't have clarity about it, it's not going to be of much use. And I tell the story in the book about some friends of mine who were going to meet with me. I actually live in Franklin, Tennessee, which is just south of Nashville, Tennessee. We're kind of a bedroom community. And so they're going to come visit me.

And so we were going to meet at a certain restaurant at a certain time. And so I went there and I was waiting and the time passed. And I thought, where are they? They called me and said, we can't find the restaurant. I said, where are you? We said, we're in Franklin. And I said, you're in Franklin? I didn't even heard of that street. Where are you? And they said, we're in Franklin. Well, it turns out they were in Franklin, Kentucky.

So they had gone north out of the airport instead of south out of the airport because they didn't have clarity, not absolute clarity about the destination. They got the Franklin part, right? They just were missing the state part. As it turns out, that was pretty important. So there's got to be clarity. Right, right. And it sounds as though there needs to be internal clarity inside your own mind as well as clarity in the way in which you convey it to others. Yes. And in fact, I have a diagram in that chapter called the vision grid. And it's a two by two matrix, you know, four boxes. The X-axis is really about vision. Either your vision is abstract or it's concrete. And then the X-axis is about communication. It's either implicit or it's explicit. And the thing that you want is a vision that's concrete and explicit. So it's not going to be ambiguous. It's not going to be, you know, nebulous, it's going to be concrete, and it's going to be expressed. It doesn't do any good if you just keep it in your head. It's got to be expressed, and that's the great value of actually writing it down so that you can pass it on, because what you want to do is create alignment in your organization around the vision. Everybody talks about alignment, but what is it?

Alignment is about clarity about the destination. And when you have that kind of alignment, then you can drive execution. So you've got to aim for concrete and explicit. Let's talk about Question number five, does it inspire? Yeah, this also is important because if you get done with your vision script and it doesn't inspire you, it's not going to inspire anybody else. It's got to be an inspiring thing to you. You've got to read it and it's got to resonate with your heart. And so, you know, when you're sharing this with your team, you've got to do it with enthusiasm.

You've got to be excited about it. And it's got to be genuine. This is not something you can gin up, something you can fake, but it's got to be something. that gets you really excited about a future that if you were to create it, that it'd be something you would be proud of, that you would be excited about. And so I go through in this chapter, you know, various characteristic of an inspiring vision. And it's important to kind of run it through that grid and evaluate it and make sure it's inspirational because guess what, you're going to have to sell it downline. You're going to have to sell it across your organization as we're coming

to, I have an entire chapter on that. You may have to sell it to your boss. Right. And this reminds me of what we talked about earlier. It needs to be a little bit risky. It needs to be outside of your comfort zone. There can be inspiration in that. It does. It's got to be the kind of thing where everybody gets excited about it, but it's also a little bit scary. You know, because collectively you go, man, I'm not sure we can do that. Like a good example I tell the book, in fact, is JFK. You know, he gave his famous moonshot vision to a joint session of Congress. And he talked about putting a man on the moon. by the end of the decade. Well, the only problem was, talk about discomfort zone, there was no technology to accomplish that. In fact, he got resistance from NASA because there's no way we can do that. We don't have the technology to do that. But it was inspiring.

You know, it inspired an entire generation, you know, tragically, he didn't live to see it, but it didn't even take a decade to do it. You know, we did it less than decade. And I think it had a lot to do, frankly, with the Soviet Union falling. You know, they just at that point gave up and said there's no way to compete against this. Question number six. Is it practical? Yeah. Is it something that can drive execution? And this is where we got into. We kind of already got over this about working to your vision,

about the idea of the link between, you know, the vision all the way down to the daily task. And so you've absolutely got to do that. It's not enough to just have a vision. This isn't like that book. I don't know if you remember this, but there was a book called The Secret. Right. I remember that. Remember that based on the law of attraction? And, you know, a very compelling book. But the idea is if you can just envision this great thing in the future and kind of put it out to the universe, then you really don't have to do anything else. It'll just kind of come to you. You know, maybe that works for some people.

It's never worked for me. But I think that the vision is the first and essential ingredient of driving execution, but it's also insufficient. It's not enough. You've got to have the vision, but then it's also got to be practical. You've got to work this to your annual plan, to your quarterly goals, to your weekly objectives, all the way down to your daily tasks. If you don't do that, your vision is probably just going to sit up there in the ether somewhere and never actually be accomplished. But wouldn't people have said that Kennedy's moonshot was not practical? Yeah, except that because he was the president and he articulated it, then all of a sudden, organizations began to move and make it operational.

So eventually somebody had to say, well, he's the boss. You know, and he said we're going to do it. It's kind of like Steve Jobs said the same thing with the iPhone. You know, he wanted to squeeze that into a form factor that was impossible. And his first engineer said, we can't do that. And he said, yeah, you can. He said, no, we can't do that. He said, yeah, you can.

And he said, and if you can't, I'll find engineers that can. And so all of a sudden, they became innovative. And that's, you know, the power of constraint. And I think that was, you know, the same thing that happened with NASA. They initially resisted it, but they eventually had to reduce it down. And, of course, when you're talking about a project that large with so much at stake, people's lives, you have to really drive down to the daily tasks, exactly how you're going to implement it. Question seven, can you sell it?

Yeah, a vision has to be sold. The most difficult person to sell is yourself. You've got to be sold on the vision. You're never going to sell it to somebody else unless you're sold yourself. That's why it's got to be inspirational first and foremost to you. If it is, then you can begin to sell it to other constituents. And I would say first and foremost, it has to be sold to your team. Why?

Because that's kind of the predicate behind alignment and execution. I keep using those words over and over again, but they're very related. So you've got to be able to sell it to your team. team, you've got to paint this vivid, compelling picture of reality. And again, by the way, this is not something that's one and done. You don't create the vision script, put it on the shelf, and then hope it comes to pass. No, this is something that you're speaking into existence. The only thing that gives it life at the beginning is you as the leader continuing to talk about it to the point where you're almost obnoxious about it. You know, during the Great Recession,

I had an executive coach, and she came to me and she said, look, we're going into a very turbulent time. Vision is going to be more important than ever because people are going to find, that they get disconnected from what their job actually means and how it contributes to the larger hole. And if you're not careful, if they don't feel like they're driving to a vision, if they're not creating a vision, then they're going to disengage. And that's the last thing you need in the middle of a recession. So she said, I want you to talk about the vision until you're sick and tired of it. I said, okay, so I didn't think it was that big a deal. But six months later, I came back to And I said, okay, I am sick and tired of talking about the vision.

She said, really? How sick and tired are you? I said, I can't stand to hear myself talk about the vision. She said, then you're a half done. She said, your people need it. Andy Stanley says that vision is like a bucket that leaks. And the problem is, if you're not refilling that vision bucket that your people are carrying around, then they're going to be walking around with empty buckets.

It was a great verse in the Bible that says, without vision, the people are perish. And it's true. You know, without vision, organizations stagnate, people disengage. So you as the leader have got to constantly be selling it downline. And you've got to have a cadence of communication so that you're communicating it on a regular basis. And one of the things I recommend in the book is for sure annually to revisit it with the entire team, but quarterly, maybe monthly, and certainly every time you consider a new opportunity to pull that vision out and say, okay, how does this square with the future that we've already envisioned. You know, sometimes if you're in an organization, your colleagues, the people that are your

peers, it's important to sell them on the vision because you probably need their cooperation. You certainly don't need them undermining you at some point. You may need to sell your boss, you know, on the vision, particularly if it's going to take resources or if it's going to take a change in direction, you're going to have to sell the boss. And, you know, that's very important. And an important part about that is that when you're ever, when you're trying to sell anybody, you've got to sell it from the perspective of what's in it for them, not what's in it for you. And so when you're talking to your boss, it's easy to get the sign off if they think what you're

proposing is going to help them accomplish what they want to achieve. And that fairly naturally leads to question eight. How do you deal with obstacles? How do you face resistance? You will always face resistance anytime you want to make an improvement to anything. Stephen Presfield wrote an entire book on this called The War of Art, which is a phenomenal book. Have you read that? Yes, I have. Yeah, great book. And so that's where I got the idea of resistance from, but you've got to have the tenacity to persist through that. You shouldn't be surprised when

the resistance shows up when you encounter obstacles. That's just the natural course of thing. I don't care if you're trying to lose weight or gain muscle or improve your marriage or whatever. You're going to face the resistance. They're going to be obstacles and they show up almost immediately at the moment you commit. And the same thing is true with a vision. They're going to be obstacles to it. So that's where you've got to stay connected to that vision. You've got to maintain your integrity. You've got to persevere, you know, through that, that resistance and get to the other side. You've got to keep the vision alive.

That's what gets you, it's what makes you resilient. It's what gets you up when you fall down if you've got a vision that you're pursuing. I remember when I was running, I think it was my second half marathon. And boy, for whatever reason, I wanted to quit at about mile number nine. I was just out of gas. but I happened to be running for a children's school that was amazing school in Franklin, Tennessee that I really believed in. And so I thought to myself, I got reconnected at that moment when I wanted to quit, I said,

but I'm doing it for these kids. You know, I'm trying to raise money for these kids. The school is really important to me. And so it enabled me to dig down deep into my Y and kept me persisting. When people lose their Y, they lose their way. And so keeping connected with that, why is critically important in facing those obstacles. In that chapter, you talk about tenacity, integrity, courage, being traits that can help you beat that resistance when it comes up. How does a person develop those traits?

How do you strengthen your courage or your tenacity? You know, I think it's like anything else. You've got to exercise it. Fortunately, life gives us lots of opportunities. But to articulate those, first of all, as goals or as worthy virtues that we want to incorporate into our life. and to see every day as an opportunity to exercise those, like courage, for example, you know, if you're doing something that's in the discomfort zone, whether it's a vision or a goal that you're pursuing, and it makes you uncomfortable to pursue it, that requires courage.

And courage doesn't mean that you feel confident on the front end. Courage just means that you're going to do it despite the fear that you have. You're going to take action despite whatever fear you may have. Some people call that, you know, doing it scared. I've got a poster on my wall that says that. just to do it scared. As you do that, over and over again, it builds up that courage as an attribute of your character. Same thing with integrity. What is integrity? Integrity is making your actions line up with your words. Every time, every time you have the opportunity to be the obstacle to

compromise your integrity, to not do what you promised. It's an opportunity to strengthen your integrity and follow through on your promise, even when it's inconvenient, even when it's expensive, even when it's more expensive than you thought at the beginning. But it's an opportunity to build your integrity. Question nine. Is it too late? Yeah, I talk about something in this chapter called the vision arc, and I basically make the case that regardless of where your organization or your department or your division is in the life cycle of that business, there's always an opportunity to use vision to revision and to reinvigorate the business. You know, if you're at a startup, I get examples like Airbnb and YouTube, or if you're rising,

You know, you're past a startup and you're beginning to get some momentum. I talk about Instagram and Starbucks in this particular section. And then transitioning where you're kind of in that place where you're not the startup, you know, things are becoming a little bit more difficult. You're transitioning into that mature spot. Then there's that mature part of the business life cycle. And then a legacy. I use the example of Microsoft. And they're a great example because they were a legacy company.

They had incredible installed user base. They were making billions of dollars every year. But they were kind of coasting. until the new CEO came into power. And he re-envisioned a different future for Microsoft, got them kind of out of coasting, and got them leading again. And boy, we've seen the resurgence

and the renaissance of Microsoft over the last couple of years. But then there's a state beyond that where it's like zombie. I give the example of a company here in Nashville, United Record Pressing Company, they were in the vital record business. And of course, with digital music,

that quickly went out of date and there were very few vinyl records. now they're working 24-7, working three shifts a day, because vinyl has made a resurgence. And they got a vision for pushing that as a medium for listening to music. And there's a lot of people out there that love vinyl today. And then even an organization that's dead. And my favorite example here is that I talk about a company that was a gaming company. They had a platform for communication and gaming.

And the company went bankrupt. It failed. But the owner said, you know, we got a pretty amazing communication platform here. I wonder if we could resurrect this as something else. Well, that company became Slack, which is a multi-billion dollar company today. It's a software platform that my company relies on. Most of my client's companies rely on. But that was something that was resurrected out of a dead company.

So it's never too late for vision. That's the moral of the story. Finally, question 10. Are you ready? How do you know that? Yeah, I just get some really practical steps here and say, like number one, schedule it. What gets scheduled gets done. So the first thing to do is block out the time in the calendar, you know, get a copy of my book, The Vision Driven Leader, read it, then schedule a half a day to go do it.

Number two, get the necessary input. You know, look at your financial statements, organizational chart, talk to some people, do a customer survey, do an employee survey, whatever it is to get some necessary input so that you're not just, you know, creating from scratch. Number three, trust the process. I've taken thousands of business owners through this process now. My average coaching clients, their business is growing over 60% a year. You know, some 20%, some 100%, but on average, over 60%. So trust the process it works and it all begins with vision. And then number four, tweak as you go.

You know, you're not going to get it right, 100% right the first time. That's okay. You can tweak it as you can go. You can iterate it. And then number five, go ahead and launch. Roll it out to the team and watch what happens. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you and your work?

Well, the best place is at my website, Michael Hyatt.com. You can find links to my programs and link to my podcast. But we've actually created a special web page for the vision-driven leader for you. It's at vision-drivenleader.com slash afford. Vision-drivenleader.com slash afford. And here's a cool thing about that. Once you buy the book and buy it from any retailer you want, but save the receipt, come to that page, enter in your receipt number, and then you'll automatically claim over $200

worth of free bonus, including an online tool that we have calling the Vision Scripter tool. And that will basically take you by the hand and walk you through the vision creation process one step at a time. It's a really cool tool. So visiondrivenleader.com slash afford for these great bonuses. That's it. Great. Well, thank you so much, Michael. Thank you, Paula. I appreciate it. Thank you, Michael.

what are the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are five. Number one, set risky, daring goals. When you don't take any risks or any chances with your business or your organization, it stagnates. You can't grow if there isn't some element of risk or challenge that's involved. Because when people say goals, there's a tendency, particularly in corporations, to play it safe. You know, because people think, well, if I don't get it out there too far, I can't fail and I won't get in trouble if I don't hit it. Again, all the goal achievement research basically says that if the goal is not set in the discomfort zone, it won't command your focus. It won't ignite innovation. It won't keep you engaged in accomplishing the goal.

Setting goals that are incremental improvements are too comfortable. Run your goals by a trustworthy mentor or friend who has a growth mindset and make sure that the goals you're setting are a reach, but a reasonable one. Don't go into the delusional zone, but do go into the discomfort zone. As Michael Hyatt says, if you're not failing some, you're also not doing it right. It's okay to set an ambitious goal and fail, but to do so in a way in which you have still learned something, you've still made progress, you've exercised your courage muscle, and the effort that you put into a goal that you might not have reached can be a foundation for the next thing that you reach So set those reasonable reach goals. Set those risky challenging goals. That's key takeaway number one. Key takeaway

number two. Create your vision script. There are four components to a vision script. The vision for your team, the vision for your product, the vision for your sales and marketing or your outreach, and the vision for your impact. We talk about the future of the team because the team is the primary means by which you bring this vision into reality. So the team is all important. Then the future of the product, whether that's actually a service or a physical product or a digital product or whatever it may be, but the future of the product, what does that look like in three years? The future of your sales and marketing, how do you go to market, how you're trying to reach people, what does your marketing look like? And then finally, the future of your impact. What are the objective,

measurable impacts that you want to have on the world? This applies to any business, but it also applies to anything that you're doing in which you are a leader. So if you volunteer for a community group or a church group and you're in charge of other volunteers, you can set a vision for this team of volunteers. You can set a vision for the team. You can also set a vision for sales and marketing. And in this case, it wouldn't literally be monetary sales, but you can set a vision for outreach, for generating enthusiasm. You can set a vision for that. You can set a vision for impact. How effective you will these volunteers be? How can their efforts and talents be harnessed in a certain way? And you can

set a vision for product, meaning what does success look like? How do you measure success? So those are ways in which having a crystal clear vision about your team, your product, your sales and marketing or outreach, and your impact can apply in any setting, whether it's business or community organizations. That is key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three. A clear focus reduces overwhelm. One of the major pitfalls of not having a clear vision is the feeling of overwhelm. There's way too much to do.

And your time, your energy, your attention is scattered in far too many directions. A vision gives you a lens through which you can evaluate opportunities. So when an opportunity comes to you, you can ask yourself, is this part of the vision? Is this an integral part of that vision? or is it outside the scope of the vision? And this is hugely important for people who feel overwhelmed. The great thing about having clarity around your vision is that it gives you the ability to say no. If you don't have that, then what happens?

And I see this in a lot of companies, a lot of busy work, a lot of sideways energy, a lack of execution, although everybody's busy, because there's no clear vision to which they're moving. Having a clear focus enabled Michael's company to go 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in light of COVID-19, and productivity has increased, so they may do this through the end of the year. Having a clear focus also gives you the ability to say no to distractions masquerading as opportunity. And so the third key takeaway is that if you are feeling overwhelmed, the thing to tackle may not be your to-do list. It may be your vision. Key takeaway number four. Link your goals to your actions.

Michael says that where most people fail is making visions actionable. It's great to have a vision, but how are you going to execute on it? He recommends setting two to three goals per quarter. Then have three outcomes that you want to achieve that week that push you closer towards these goals. And then have the daily big three tasks each day that push you towards that goal for the week. So drill down. Quarter to week today. Daily actions repeated over a few months makes a big difference. That creates the linkage that drives execution because so often people come up with a vision or they come up with goals and then they don't happen because they're not driving them from an execution perspective from their daily actions. Now, as a note, Michael recommends setting two to three goals overall. Don't have two to three goals for work and two to three goals for your personal life.

As he says, your life is a seamless whole. What are the two or three things in any arena or any vertical or any facet of your life that are most important to you now? That is key takeaway number four. And finally, key takeaway number five, create a flexible why. Michael cites the example of Kodak versus Fuji film. Kodak wanted to continue serving the customers they had, and their existing vision supported that. so they saw no reason to incorporate digital. They were worried that digital photography would undermine film,

and they wanted to stick with the status quo. Fuji, on the other hand, wanted to serve those who want to preserve memories through photographs. That's a much bigger, much broader vision, and digital cameras fall under that vision. So Kodak's vision, Kodak's Y, wasn't flexible. They relied on one form of technology, and technology is a technology that. tactic. Their reliance was on a specific form of technology, and that proved disastrous to Kodak's business model. Whereas Fuji, which wanted to preserve memories through photographs, that was a much bigger picture idea, which made space for changing technologies. And that's why Fuji came out ahead.

Now, it's fine to adjust, because the vision or the why that you set five years ago may need to be updated. It's an iterative process. Starting with something is better than starting with no vision at all. But remember, this is a dynamic document. This is an iteration. Michael suggests meeting once a year with your team to evaluate your vision and your why. Once a year, and we do this once a year at Michael Heiding Company, we're in our strategic planning process. We revisit that vision and ask ourselves the question, does this still represent what we see in the future? Do we need to loosen it up and make it more broader? Do we need to tighten it down and make it more specific? Or is it about right? Those are five key takeaways from this conversation with Michael Hyatt. You can download his free

resources at visiondrivenleader.com slash afford. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend or a family member. That's the single most important thing that you can do to help spread this message. Please also leave us a review in whatever app you're using to listen to this show. If you are at your computer, you can go to afford anything.com slash iTunes. That'll redirect you to the page on the Apple podcast website, where you can leave us a review. Thanks to the sponsors who make this episode possible. For a complete list of all of our sponsors, plus the deals, discounts, promo codes that they offer, you can find all of that at afford anything.com slash sponsors. I am matching donations up to $3,000 for three

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