Thought for the day:

I heard John Maxwell say once that “previously it was thought that if you could cast vision, you were a leader. But there is more than one thing to being a leader - in fact there are 21″ (a reference to his 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership).

I certainly know some people who can cast vision like anything, but I was left wondering - “why does this person sound like a leader, but have no-one following them, and not inspire me to follow them either?”

I realized that vision is not sufficient - it has to be credible vision to be effective. I wrote about that in a post on Effective Vision in May of last year.

Today’s thought is a re-expression of that.

Vision gains credibility as you execute on it and get results.

In the beginning perhaps no-one else “gets” your vision. No-one else pays it any heed, believes in it, or wants to contribute to it. But you don’t let that stop you (if you do you definitely don’t have a credible vision). You execute on it anyway, because your vision has at least enough credibility to have one person who believes in it (you), and as you execute on it and make it happen, it rises in credibility.

Here is an example:

My first job in the tech industry was assembling PCs in a small firm in Auckland, New Zealand, called Eclipse Technology. After about 6 months there the company went bankrupt. I remember bumping into the CEO, Carmel, in the hallway during the windup process. She asked me what I was going to do. I told her that I thought I’d be a sysadmin, maybe with Unix machines. Six months previously I’d come from a job I’d held for a year washing dishes in a cafe.

She looked at me and scoffed: “You’ll never do that - you’ve got no experience”.

I didn’t want to point out to her that as the CEO of a company that just went bankrupt she didn’t enjoy so much credibility with me. Obviously my vision of my employment future didn’t have so much credibility back then for people other than myself. Three years later, on the cusp of Y2K I was a sysadmin, albeit for Windows machines. Ten years later, I’m working administering Linux systems.

Ok, to round off this post - here’s another thought I’ve been having for a while:

Vision - if you can hold it, you can have it.

The bigger the vision, the more opportunities you’ll get to give it up, before you get it.

Three very inspirational stories for me from the sacred literature are the stories of Dhruva Maharaja as a child, and also his encounter with the mystical illusions of the Yaksas, and the life story of one of my personal heroes, Hiranyakasipu.