Page 37 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Building a Unifying Vision 27

society. In the HBR article “Successful Startups Don’t Make Money Their
Primary Mission,” describing successful new ventures, Kevin Laws, COO
of AngelList, argues that if the goal of an organization is simply to make
money, it won’t make it through the rough patches. Sure, it needs to make
money in order to achieve its vision, but without that separate vision to
guide and inspire the people involved, the organization won’t do either. Ex-
amples of this abound: Google didn’t set out to become a company with one
of the largest market capitalizations in the world, but rather to “organize
the world’s information and make it accessible to everyone.” Apple didn’t
start out with the vision of having an astronomic stock price, but rather, in
Steve Jobs’s original formulation, to “make a contribution to the world by
making tools for the mind that advance humankind.”

The vision cascade
Note that visions and associated BHAGs are not the sole province of the
CEO and the corporate level. Like Macia, if you are the leader of a unit,
division, or even a team, you can develop your own bold vision. But for that
kind of vision, there is an additional criterion: it must support and align
with the organization’s overall vision.
For example, Macia’s Blackboard unit at AIG is focused on under-
writing, but it aligns with and supports the overall vision of the company
to leverage technology and data science in the reinvention of insurance.
Similarly, the MD Anderson moon-shot programs are essentially visions
created by clinical division heads, but they all support the overall vision of
“making cancer history.”
Whether you are creating a vision for your whole organization or re-
crafting a vision for your particular unit, keep these definitions and re-
quirements in mind. They’ll help you refine and improve your vision—and
help your team do the same—throughout the process.

Crafting your vision

You can break the practice of actually crafting a vision to meet these stan-
dards into four sequential steps. The first is to determine whether it’s even