Building Church Leaders.com has a great article by Ken Blanchard, author of The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do.

I once asked Don Shula, longtime coach of the Miami Dolphins, “What are your goals next year?”

He said, “I think goal-setting is overrated.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everybody in professional football has a similar goal,” he answered. “If they have halfway decent players, they want to win the playoffs. If they have good players, they want to win the Super Bowl. So I haven’t won more games because I have better goals. I’ve won more games because I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and do whatever it takes to make it happen.”

Leadership demands that we have the ability to realize our goals—to turn vision into reality. Those who have given themselves to leadership know how difficult this is. But effective leaders have a way of getting to the real issues.

In 2001 Vrajadhama and I spent the night in Don Shula’s resort in Miami (it’s a long story). Don wasn’t there, but I must say I was very impressed with his digs.

I like this point of his too. If we don’t set any goals, we’re not even in the game. People who actually have goals are on the playing field. Doing the work needed to achieve those goals is where the real differentiation comes in.

One thing that I noted in Prema Padmini’s recent presentation on Bhakti-vrksa (we have a podcast on that coming up), is that there was definite goal setting - there were statistics of performance, targets, and then measurement of success or failure in achieving those targets.

On Geoff’s recommendation I obtained a copy of First XI: Winning Organisations in Australia. The first section of this book is entitled “Effective Execution”. The top performing organisations in Australia all have in common that they pre-announce their goals, then get them.

I’m sure that there are organisations that pre-announce and then fail on execution, but the fact of the matter is that you have to have goals, and you then have to achieve them.

Here’s a quote that I read recently:

A vision without a task makes a visionary
A task without vision makes for drudgery
A task with a vision makes a missionary

Now that you’ve read my ten cents worth, check out the full text of Ken’s article Turning Vision into Reality, in which he talks about the practicalities involved in turning vision into reality, with reference to church and business situations.

As an addendum to that last post: credible vision alone is also insufficient for authentic leadership. There have been people who have had credible vision. They have convinced people to join them in their cause, but they’ve gone the wrong way.

One definition of leadership, which I consider to be a powerful but incomplete one, is that it is “simply your ability to inspire the men through your communication”. That’s definitely an important factor, but far from the only one.

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.

Here is a new article that I wrote this morning on the subject of Preaching for Leadership Recruitment < - click there to read it. I’ve been thinking about it over the past month, since I was in New Zealand in early December. I finally managed to get it down in response to a process of strategic planning that we are doing here in Brisbane.

This article talks about four types of people, based on the presentation of Bhagavad-gita, and how these people are attracted to, and best engaged in an organization. I’ve written it in the language of Urban Missionary, but if you want to translate it to a business context simply use this translation table:

Preaching = Marketing
If you want to know about how to appeal to these people.

Preaching = Recruiting
If you want to know about constructing an organization based on these principles.

Get the right people, and get them in the right roles, and then everything else will take care of itself. Fail to do this as a first step and everything significant will be impossible to achieve and you’ll spend most of your time dealing with problems.

Organizational ineffectiveness stems from lack of competent leadership. Degrading organizational effectiveness is due to lack of leadership succession. Failure to expand is due to lack of leadership reproduction.

In order to be successful an organization needs a culture of leadership development and a consciousness of recruiting for leadership potential. As Srila Prabhupada explained his strategic vision for establishing varnasrama-dharma - first establish the brahmana class (visionary leaders), then the create the Varnasrama college and train the ksatriyas (directive leaders).