Multi-level visioning

The single most important foundation stone of business success today is leadership-especially visionary leadership. General Electric, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Dell Computer, and Wal-Mart-all visionary companies. What do those companies have in common? Each is obsessive about what it does, and never stops emphasizing that. In Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, James Collins and Jerry Porras note qualities that truly visionary companies have in common: They possess a bedrock faith and uncommon passion for what they're in business to do. They navigate the business world with extraordinary deftness-adapting their strategies, operating goals, and culture as necessary while remaining true to an enduring set of values. They have a, core ideology (from which their values spring) that is unchanging and that transcends immediate customer demands and market conditions. They allow the unifying ideology to guide and inspire people, creating enormous solidarity and esprit de corps. a They subscribe to BHAGS-"big, hairy, audacious goals." Because a company doesn't so much create its core ideology as arrive at it through an organic process of selfreflection and action planning, it's critical that every company develop strategic visioning and process tools to help it reassess and, if necessary, reframe its organizational vision periodically. You can use strategic visioning tools to help you and your organization engage in breakthrough thinking, scenario planning, product imagineering, and leadership competency building. Information developed from such tools coalesces leadership thinking around business priorities and creates a new foundation of empirical data and shared opinions.