Brand + Vision

Leaders most organizations behave in one of two ways: they are either compelled to talk about their vision at every possible chance, or the vision is only thought about during the annual strategic planning sessions and pointedly ignored the rest of the time.

Vision is a $50, cottage-industry-spawning, buzzword. But really a vision is simply your mental image of how things could or ought to be. In general this should be fairly high level, so that you don't have lots of visions. If you do, it's fairly likely that what you really have are goals related to a single overarching vision.

One of the necessary conditions for creating a vision of your own is being able—either by virtue of training, natural ability, or time in a position of sufficient seniority—to see the big picture and then to see what's wrong with that picture and imagine how things could be better.