Instead of a fancy ‘vision statement’, leaders would be far better of defining what ‘winning’ for their company looks like.

Vision statements are generally abstract. These are mostly written as a checklist item by Management.

While winning criteria is far more concrete: Gaining 50% market share or IPO’ing by X date.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What game your company is playing?
  2. How will you know that you have won?

I am pretty sure 90% of us will fail to answer this. And that my friend is a tragedy.

P.S The winning criteria has to be inspiring but also seem real. I worked for a startup, where the CEO used to release regular press statements saying we were close to breakeven, and the goal was a NASDAQ IPO the following year. The year kept getting pushed from 201X to 201(X+1), and the IPO never happened. We all knew the IPO was too good to be true, and soon those PR articles brought laughter to the team, than inspiration. Treat this as a cautionary tale.