Michael Hyatt: Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael: And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Today we’re going to clear up some confusion a lot of business leaders feel around vision, mission, and strategy.

Megan: This gets really confusing. We’ve been talking a lot about vision right now, Dad, because of your new book The Vision Driven Leader, and while everybody agrees that vision is a good thing, it can be really hard to define. In fact, there’s a whole list of related terms out there, like mission statement and core values and guiding principles and strategy documents and vision statements. Nobody seems to agree on exactly what the term means, so no wonder we’re confused.

Michael: If you’re confused about all this right now, we have help for you. Today we’re going to be solving this problem of trying to understand these terms and how they relate to your business. We’re going to tell you about four documents you need to guide a healthy business, but before we do that, we have to bring Larry in. Hey, Larry.

Larry Wilson: Hey, Michael. Hi, Megan.

Megan: Hey, Larry.

Larry: As I was thinking about this topic for today, we have seen a lot of trends in business kind of come and go, and probably a lot of fads. Is this vision thing one of those Silicon Valley fads like massage chairs and black turtlenecks and all that?

Michael: No, I don’t think so. These are terms I’ve heard for my entire career. The term vision certainly gained a lot of notice in the 1992 presidential election when George H.W. Bush famously referred to the “vision thing,” but great leaders in any endeavor (I don’t care what it is…business, politics, military, whatever) have always been guided by a clear vision for the future.

Think of John Kennedy calling us to send a man to the moon and back in 1961. That was an incredible vision, especially given the fact that the technology didn’t exist and there was no way we could have done it given what we had available at the time. The concept of mission goes back at least 2,000 years. Jesus gave a mission to his disciples known as the Great Commission, but having a reason for being is not a uniquely religious idea. Even the US Constitution states a purpose for our country. Do you remember what it is, Larry? This is a little test.

Larry: Yes, I do, but I’m going to throw this to Megan because…

Michael: Talk about passing the buck.

Larry: “In order to establish a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, and secure the benefits of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” etcetera.

Michael: I’m pretty impressed. I’ll tell you why it’s important. Every entity, every organization, including countries, need these foundational documents that serve as the philosophical underpinning for everything they do. It may seem nonessential or certainly not important at this particular time, but it really is, because it’s going to guide more than you think, as we’ll see as we go through this episode.

Megan: It’s funny, because one of the things I’ve seen happen in recent years is that leaders have kind of tweaked this language, and they use terms like our future focus or our core ideology or our nonnegotiables. The problem with some of these… Some of them are fine, but some of them are not actionable. They sound good, but you can’t really go do that thing. For example, “We are solutions” or “Engineering tomorrow” or “We will be the undisputed market leader.” No wonder people are confused. How can this guide you if you can’t even understand what you would do if it were true?

Larry: I share the confusion I’m sure many of our listeners have had, but you guys have worked through this, and, Michael, you wrote a book about vision. How did you put all this together?

Michael: Well, pretty much necessity. I’ve had to run businesses at every level, large and small, and I realized that leadership is based on certain foundational ideas or governing ideas. You need to know why you’re in business, you need to know where you’re trying to go, you need to know what kind of people you want to be, and you need to know how to make all of that happen. The details differ from business to business, but the categories are exactly the same. I would suggest that even nonprofits need these same four documents. They’re the guiding ideas for any business, and these are the things that are going to show us the way forward.

Larry: Well, today we’re saying that you can guide your business well if you get a handle on these four documents which form the foundation of any viable business or organization. We’re going to define these terms clearly and simply so you can see how to create them for your own business, and, of course, there’s a lot more help on this subject in Michael’s new book The Vision Driven Leader. So, let’s get to the first document, which is a vision script.

Michael: In a sense, each of these documents is going to ask an important question about us as organizations. Vision is about where. Where do we want to take the organization? It’s about a future destination. In fact, as a leader, if you’re not clear on the destination, where are you leading anyone? You can’t lead without a vision. That’s why we use the term vision. It’s about picturing the future. It’s not about today, it’s not about operations, it’s not even about strategy (we’ll cover those in a little bit), but it’s about the future.

Larry: I think a lot of us have heard that term vision statement for years and years, but your language on this, Michael, is a little different. You call it a vision script.

Michael: Yeah, let me define that. When I say vision script, here’s what I mean. It’s a written document three to five pages in length. So, it’s not some motto, some brief, clever, pithy thing you can put on a coffee mug or slap on a tee shirt. It’s more robust than that. It’s a written document three to five pages in length. It outlines a clear, inspiring, practical, and attractive picture of your organization’s future. It describes reality as you see it. It starts with the leader. This is not something you can delegate or outsource. It describes reality as you see it, three to five years from now, and it’s written in the present tense as though it has already happened.

Megan: Dad, I think people get this confused sometimes with a motto. They kind of think this vision statement idea is the same as this vision script you’re talking about, so then they think about mottos they know, like Nike’s “Just do it” or McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” or “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” which is M&M’s motto. The problem with those is they’re about branding, not leading. They don’t help you decide where to go next. They’re for external purposes, not internal purposes. What you’re talking about is something that guides the internal direction of the company.

Michael: Yeah, think of it like this. Before we embark on a journey, we have to be clear and we have to be aligned around the destination. One of the things, Megan, you know because you’re part of our family, that we do usually every fall is we go to the beach. We go to the Rosemary Beach area of the panhandle of Florida. As a family, our extended family, we agree on that destination. Nobody is in doubt about where we’re going. When we start the journey, we know exactly where it’s going to end up. That’s a pretty robust picture in our minds, because in this particular case, we’ve been there before.

But in an organization’s life, you have to be clear about the destination. How you get there is more about strategy, which we’re going to talk about in a moment, and sometimes that can vary depending on conditions on the ground. Sometimes when we go to Rosemary Beach there may be a traffic challenge, you know, roadwork. There may be a big wreck. There may be weather, a variety of things that require us to change strategy, but the destination remains the same. You really can’t go anywhere…you certainly can’t take anybody with you…unless you’re clear, first, on the destination.

Larry: So the vision script is about where. It’s where you’re going as a company or organization. It points to the future. As I mentioned, there’s a lot more detail on this vision process in The Vision Driven Leader.

Michael: There is, and I should point out that the book is now a Wall Street Journal Best Seller. We have $196 worth of free bonuses for anybody who buys the book right now. There’s the video on sharing your vision with your team, which I did with Megan. That’ll walk you through everything you need to know about rolling out your vision. Plus you’ll get the 20/20 Vision Kit, which is an ebook with tips to give you an unobstructed view of your vision for 2020, plus a Liberating Truths worksheet to help you put that into practice, but here’s the best part: when you buy 10 or more copies…

And you’re going to want this for your team. Believe me. It gives you a common language. You want everybody aligned around this process. When you buy 10 or more copies, you get all that plus the half-day vision intensive, which is a recording I did sharing my powerful vision training workshop. All that is available. All you have to do is buy the book from your favorite bookseller…Amazon, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, your favorite local bookseller, whomever…bring the receipt to visiondrivenleader.com, turn in the number, and you’ll be able to claim these bonuses for free.

Megan: Dad, I want to say one thing about that. First of all, those bonuses are awesome, but if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Man! This feels really overwhelming to try to think about how to create a vision script. I haven’t done that before, and maybe that’s only for people who are really, really seasoned leaders or who are great writers,” one of the things that’s so great about The Vision Driven Leader and this vision scripting process is that it’s like paint by numbers. You really do a great job of making this accessible and failproof for people so that anybody, no matter what your experience is or how good of a writer you think you are or how inspirational you think you are… This is something anybody can do with the process you outline in The Vision Driven Leader book.

Michael: Well, I’ve now taken thousands of business owners, nonprofit leaders, people in every kind of industry through the process. It really does work, because like you said, I’ve really deconstructed it, made it super simple and easy to use. I think most of us labor under the assumption that to be visionary we have to be charismatic, we have to have a special personality type, or we have to be super smart, clairvoyant even, but we don’t. This is for mere mortals. This is for the average person who knows they need a vision script and doesn’t know how to do it. This is going to walk you through the process.

Larry: So, that’s the first document you need to successfully operate your business. That’s a vision script. The second document is a mission statement.

Megan: Mission is really about why. Why do you get out of bed every morning? Why do you exist? It’s about your purpose. For example, you might know about Amazon. Their mission is to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online. Speaking as a voracious Amazon consumer, I can say they are living their mission out.

Google’s, for example, is “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Walt Disney is “We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages everywhere.” EBay’s is “At eBay, our mission is to provide a global online marketplace where practically anyone can trade practically anything, enabling economic opportunity around the world.” I love that one.

Michael: I do too. These are great, and they’re inspiring, and they really articulate the why for these organizations. Years ago, what I did was I took some of the best mission statements out there, and I basically asked, “What do these all have in common?” Some of them are missing some elements. Even some of the examples you gave, Megan, are missing some of the elements here, but I’ve found the best way to construct a mission statement is to answer four questions.

First of all: Who are you as a business entity? I’m going to give you a formula here in a minute that’s almost fill-in-the-blank. Who are you as a business entity? Are you a law firm? Are you a military organization? Are you a retailer? What are you? What is your business identity? The second question is…Who do you serve? What’s your target market? Who are the people and, particularly, what is the problem they have that you’re trying to solve?

Then…What’s your unique solution? In other words, what do you bring to the table that solves the problem you articulated in that second part of the mission statement? Finally…What’s your promised transformation? Here’s the thing, Meg, and I know you know this. Larry, you know this too. People don’t buy solutions; they buy transformations. They’re buying a transformation they think they’re going to get by means of the product or the service you offer, so it’s important to spell out that promised transformation, because in essence, that’s what you’re selling.

Let me give you an example. The first question is “Who are we as a business? What’s our business identity?” At Michael Hyatt & Company we say, “Michael Hyatt & Company is a leadership development company. Our mission is to glorify God by helping overwhelmed successful leaders get the focus they need to win at work and succeed at life.” All four parts of those are answered here in this mission statement.

First of all, we’re a leadership development company. That’s our business identity. Who’s our target market? Overwhelmed successful leaders. So, we’ve identified the target. We’ve also identified the problem they have, which is overwhelm. Those are the people we best serve. It’s probably some of you listening to this.

Then we get to this part: get the focus they need. That’s our unique solution. We’re all about the focus. We have the Full Focus Planner. I wrote a book called Free to Focus. We’re all about helping people get the focus they need. Why? What’s the transformation? What difference does that make? The focus they need (and here’s the promised transformation) to win at work and succeed at life. We’re after what we affectionately call the double win, work-life balance, the kind of life most of us are seeking to achieve.

Larry: Megan, it strikes me that the corporate mission statement you latched on to, which was from eBay, is the one of the four that had the most explicit transformation, which was enabling economic opportunity around the world, which is powerful.

Megan: It really is powerful. I have not read that before, and when I read it, I was like, “Yeah!” I liked eBay before, but now I really like them, to understand what their mission is…not just what they do but what their mission is in the world…what they’re trying to accomplish through what they do, which is pretty exciting. Kind of like, for us, the double win. What’s that transformation?

Michael: We’ve had so many of our clients say to us when they go through this mission statement process, when they answer these four questions, it gives them extraordinary clarity about who they are as an organization. For the first time, they’ve had to dial in “Who is it we’re serving? And, by the way, what is our unique solution? What is the thing we have to offer to the world, and what is that promised transformation?” That can take a lot of thought.

This sounds simple. We’re talking about it here in a few minutes, but this literally can take a couple of hours, maybe half a day. It’s a process of coming up with this clarity where you really think through possibilities, try them on, see if they work. If they don’t, then you try on something else. Have a conversation with your leadership team. But this is important to get clarity around this as well.

Megan: One of the things we should probably say… The reason these four documents are so essential is because they serve as a filter for you. They serve as a compass and a filter. They’re directional in that they’re like a compass, but they also serve as a filter, and they help you keep things that are not in alignment with either your mission or your values or the other things we’re going to talk about coming up here…

They help you to not do things you need to not do that would take you off track. I think that’s really important, because the more successful you become, the more “good opportunities” are going to come your way, and you can just be all over the map, where nobody internally or externally knows what you stand for.

Michael: Again, they kind of define the boundaries. It’s much like the Constitution. Larry was attempting to quote from that earlier. To have that foundational document kind of demarks the playing field…what’s inbounds, what’s out of bounds…so you can play a game and it can be rewarding. The game of business is really important, but it’s not very much fun if you don’t have rules or don’t have boundaries so you know exactly where the game has to happen.

Larry: So, the first document you need to operate your business successfully is a vision script. The second document is a mission statement. That brings us to the third document: a strategic plan.

Michael: Vision asks the question…Where? Mission asks the question…Why? A strategic plan asks the question…How? How do we get from where we are right now to where we want to go? What direction do we want to go in? It’s all about the path. Frankly, this is the part that changes the most often, a little bit like that trip to Florida example I just gave a moment ago.

Depending on conditions on the ground, your strategy can shift. Your vision shouldn’t change very often, though you want to tweak it from year to year. Your mission shouldn’t change very often, though that is also something you can revisit and tweak as you get greater clarity. Strategy is something you want to use for as long as it works, but once it stops working, you don’t just decide to go to a different destination.

I mean, if we encounter roadwork or weather on the way to our vacation paradise in the panhandle of Florida, we don’t just give up on that and say, “Oh, I guess it’s not meant to be. Let’s pick a different destination.” No. We figure out another path, and that’s exactly what you have to do with a strategy document.

It’s important that we not ask this question about how too early, and having this distinction between vision and strategy and mission is going to be important to you as you lead these conversations inside your organization, because immediately, as you begin to paint a picture of the future, people are going to say, “Well, but how?” And it’s not the time.

You can short-circuit the process, you can sabotage your own future by asking the question how too early, because the truth is until you get clarity about the destination, the how is at best irrelevant, but the worst case, it’ll derail you. Because you can’t see the how, you think the vision is not possible, and you give up on it before you start.

So, you want to get clarity about that vision so if somebody brings up the question, “But how? How are we going to do that? We don’t have the resources,” or whatever, then you have to say, “Well, we’re going to get to strategy a little bit later. We’re going to talk about a strategic plan later. Until we have clarity around the vision, until we have a vision script, then strategy is really not relevant, but we will get to that question shortly.”

Megan: I think, as a leader, this becomes a discipline for you, and it becomes something you help your team grow in as a leadership discipline as well. It takes a lot of restraint, especially for more inexperienced, maybe more hesitant leaders to not go immediately to the how, and some people are just kind of wired in that way. They just think in terms of “How are we going to get there?” and all that.

You’re really asking people to stay in that place of suspended disbelief so they’re able to envision the future, something that does not exist yet, before they’re jumping to how we’re going to get there, and as a leader, you need to be prepared for the challenge you’re going to encounter when you go into that conversation so you can prepare people, sort of head off that objection at the pass, because it will come up in almost every case.

Larry: Michael, a few moments ago you referenced that these documents are important for nonprofits or other organizations as well. My experience, at least, is that this is a point at which church leaders tend to conflate strategy and either vision or mission. With any nonprofit, I think it’s a temptation to think that doing the things we do is why we’re here rather than producing the transformation that is a part of our vision.

Michael: Frankly, I find that in the church… At least the leaders I work with are fairly visionary, but they get derailed by the people on their board or maybe it’s their lay leadership or whatever the next level of leadership under them is, because those people are practical. They start asking the question, “How?” and if you’re not careful, you get sucked into that conversation too early. The thing you have to do as a leader is you have to resist that conversation until you get clarity about the destination. The way to respond to that…

If I were a pastor and I had somebody on my board kind of shake their head and say, “Hey, we tried that before” or “We don’t have enough resources” or “Have you looked at our bank account lately?” or they ask all of those kinds of questions about how, I’d say, “Hey, look. Those are legitimate concerns. We’re going to talk about strategy. We’re going to answer the question how a little bit later, but until we get clarity around the destination, it’s not a conversation I’m ready to have yet.” You have to kind of fence it off, put boundaries around it. Promise people you’ll get to it. Don’t shame them, because it is an important question; it’s just too early. It’s a question of timing. That’s all.

Megan: I think that’s right, Dad. It’s also why it’s a mistake to jump to strategy too quickly. While tactics are vitally important, they have to serve us, not the other way around. Unless they’re founded or kind of derived from a clear vision, strategy can take you all over the place. You can be really strategic and get to a destination you do not want to go to. So it’s really important that you use strategy to help you get to the place you’ve already said you want to go and not the other way around.

The other thing here is that strategy is not sacred. You kind of talked about this a little bit already. You may have to change strategy over and over and over again to realize your vision. In fact, we can pretty much guarantee that that’s going to happen. I think sometimes people get this backward. They get really flexible with their vision. They don’t hold those boundaries very tightly, and they get really rigid on their strategy and just keep trying the same thing over and over and over.

They keep trying to go the same way to Florida, and when they hit the roadblock, they just turn around, go back to the start, and do it again. You’re not going to make progress that way. You really have to hold your strategy loosely. You can only see so far at the beginning when you create your strategic plan, for example, prior to the beginning of a year, like most of us do.

You’re doing your best to see into the future, to see how you’re going to get to the point of your vision that ends at the end of that year, but it’s going to change along the way, and what you need to really stay fixed on is that vision so that you’re always asking yourself the question, “Is this strategy moving closer or further away from my vision?” and you can evaluate it in that way.

Larry: So far, we’ve talked about three of the four documents you need to guide your business: a vision script, a mission statement, and a strategic plan. Now let’s get to the fourth one, which is core values.

Megan: I think this one might be my favorite, because I feel like it has so much impact on our daily lives and our daily work. Values are about who. Who are we as we take this journey? Who are we becoming along the way? It’s about our character and our culture and our behavior, and core values really guide you in a number of ways. First of all, they define culture. This is a statement about how you do your work. They’re also a filter for recruiting. We focus intently on recruiting people who are in alignment with our core values.

In fact, one of the last stages of our interview process involves a core value or a values alignment gut check as a part of our interview process, because we want to make sure that as we’re talking with someone, they’re not out of alignment with our values. That’s going to create friction later on. It’s going to show up in performance. We’re not operating from the same rule book, and we know that’s going to be a problem. Conversely, when people are in alignment with our core values, man, there’s almost nowhere you can’t go together.

They’re also a measure of integrity. We want our choices to match our values. Our behaviors should be in alignment with our values. I have had many occasions… In our office, I can look out into the middle area of our office and see eight posters up on our wall (we’ll talk a little bit about what these are in a minute) with each of our core values on them.

I’ve been in situations where I was making a decision, and I could see one of those core values, and that became a filter for the decision I was about to make, because I didn’t want to be out of alignment with our values and I wanted my behavior, my decision-making, to match the values we had established as a company.

Michael: When you’re stating these values, they should be simple and, to the extent that you can, be memorable. You don’t have to be super clever, but they need to be memorable. These need to be, again, something that guides your behavior. There’s kind of a debate about whether they should be aspirational or descriptive. In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great he argues for the fact that they should be descriptive. In other words, it would be disingenuous to have a value that wasn’t how you are.

I disagree with that, and here’s why. I think values should be about who you’re becoming, and that’s always aspirational. I hope I’m not the same person today that I was a decade ago. I’m in the process of becoming, and I’m becoming something other than what I am right now. So, if some of these are not exactly true to your organization right now but you aspire for them to be true, they kind of serve almost like a goal does, a future state you want to achieve and you want to work toward.

Megan: That’s a really interesting point, Dad. I’ve certainly heard it explained the opposite way, of course, like most of us have. One of the things, though, I wonder about that… How do you avoid an attitude of cynicism from your team if you say that integrity, for example, is a value for you but they know you’re not acting with integrity? You know, you say you want that, but your behavior isn’t in alignment with that. How do you address that issue or just the gap between where you are and where you want to be?

Michael: I think you just have to be totally honest. You have to be self-aware to know if you’re not living out that value. By the way, none of us, even when they’re descriptive, are living out these values 100 percent of the time. In a sense, any value is going to be aspirational. But I think you have to be totally honest. For me to stand up as the CEO at Michael Hyatt & Company and say, “We’re committed to unyielding integrity…” There are times I may exaggerate something, round up the numbers, try to appear better than we are. I want you guys to call me on it, because I’m committed to growing in the area of unyielding integrity. So in that sense, I think they can be aspirational.

Megan: So really, the imperative for you, as a leader, is to make sure you’re constantly talking about how you’re moving toward the realization of that aspiration. So, you’re talking about how you’re making decisions as you move into the future that are in alignment with those values or how people’s daily choices and behavior are not in alignment with the values. You’re not just kind of putting it up on the shelf; you’re working actively toward it all the time.

Michael: Yeah. In a sense, it’s not that different from vision, because in a vision script you’re describing a future state that’s not reality yet, but you’re moving toward it. So you state it in the present tense, and it would be easy for somebody just listening in to think, “Man, are these people self-deceived? They’ve come up with this vision script that talks about how great they are and all of these things they’ve accomplished, but I don’t see any of that yet.” No, because it hasn’t come into being yet, but we’ve articulated the destination. So, in a sense, the values describe who we are and who we’re becoming, the destination from a character or culture perspective of what we want to be as an organization. Can I give you two examples?

Megan: Yeah.

Michael: Okay. These are from the Michael Hyatt & Company core values. One is unyielding integrity. We find that if we have a descriptive word, an adjective before that noun, it’s helpful to give it some nuance and granularity that helps people grasp it. So, unyielding integrity. Then we describe the behavior. It’s not just identifying the value, because that’s not going to be that helpful. People can pour into it their own meaning.

So what we try to do is to give a statement that also describes the behavior. In this case, we say, “Unyielding integrity: we tell the truth, do what’s right, and honor our commitments even when it’s expensive, inconvenient, or embarrassing.” Here’s another one: “Relentless wow: we engineer transformational products, services, and experiences with envy-inspiring levels of excellence and attention to detail.” Again, we’re describing that value as it gets fleshed out in terms of our behavior.

Megan: Like I said at the beginning, what I love about this is it’s so actionable. I was saying a minute ago I’ve sat in our conference room, and I can see the poster that says “Unyielding integrity” from that conference room, and I’ve made decisions I didn’t want to make but that were in alignment with doing what’s right and honoring our commitments, etcetera, that I probably wouldn’t have made, or not so easily, without the clarity that comes from this description that’s attached to the value around the behavior.

Larry: You know, Megan, those core values, not just because they’re on the poster but because we actually talk about them and put them into use… They filter down. That comes down to a staff level. When you talk about relentless wow and you have to decide whether to take one more pass at this document or send it out as it is, that core value guides what you do. It really works.

Megan: That’s a good point. Just a pro tip on leadership here. It’s not okay to just have these on the wall; you have to talk about them and really draw attention to them when you see people living them out. For example, we actually give awards to our team every year for people who embody these values, which is so much fun, because then they kind of become the 3D poster child of what that behavior looks like that people can point to all year long.

So we want to notice this. We want to call it out as leaders when we’re making decisions. “This is why I’m making this decision: because we are committed to unyielding integrity,” for example, or “We’re committed to relentless wow.” That helps people start to understand what the flesh and skin look like on the bones of these values so they can picture it and then do that for themselves.

Michael: Good point.

Larry: So, today we’ve learned that you can guide your business well if you get a handle on the four documents that form the foundation of any healthy organization. The first document is a vision script, and that tells you where you’re headed. The second document is a mission statement, which tells you what you do. The third document is a strategic plan, which is about how you will get to your destination. And the fourth document is core values, which say who you are and who you’re becoming along the way. Final thoughts today, Michael, Megan?

Megan: Well, Dad, you talk about in The Vision Driven Leader the difference between managers and leaders. When I was thinking about this, I thought, “These four documents really are the difference between a leader and a manager.” If you’re someone who has these four documents…you’ve taken the time to think through them, you’ve really done the hard work of chiseling out these different perspectives…you’re in a position to lead in a way that a manager never could.

A manager is someone who is executing on these things on the leader’s behalf, but a leader is someone who is hewing these things out of a rock into the future. I think the great thing is these are all things anybody can do. They’re attainable. They’re not some kind of wizardry. Anybody can create these documents, and it really starts with a vision script. I love that you’ve outlined that process so clearly for us in The Vision Driven Leader book.

Michael: Thank you. As I was thinking about this, I thought probably 2 percent of the organizations I’ve coached initially have these documents in place. Very, very rare. I think the reason for that is because these are really important foundational documents, but they’re not urgent.

Too often, leaders and managers both get busy responding or reacting to the urgent things at hand, but because they don’t have these foundational documents in place, they end up reinventing the wheel, making bad decisions, not having a way to filter either the opportunities they pursue or the distractions they reject or the people they hire or the people they don’t hire. There’s no basis for it. They’re making it up as they go. Taking a little extra time to get these in place can guide you in powerful ways that will shape your organization for decades to come.

Larry: Michael and Megan, I’d like to thank you for putting some real order around some loose concepts that a lot of people struggle with. I think it’s going to bring a lot of clarity and multiply the impact of a lot of leaders.

Michael: Thank you, Larry. Thank you, Megan. And thank all of you for joining us. We’ll see you right here next week. Until then, lead to win.