Steve Jobs on Vision
“Vision” is a word liable evoke cynicism as much as inspiration. Scott Adams has sustained a whole career as a cartoonist by lampooning such corporate lingo in his popular Dilbert strip. Yet, the fact is that having a meaningful vision is crucial to leadership, both as an individual and in organizations.
The operative word here is meaningful. A meaningful strategic vision will articulate and find synergies between three elements:
Your values and aspirations.
Your capabilities and resources.
Your environment (with its various opportunities, threats, and changing circumstances).
These three elements come together in a strategy: by considering different possible courses of action, you can identify the best course of action, where your capabilities are deployed in the most meaningful and impactful way possible.
Vision is a kind of aspirational endpoint to the strategy. It has to both be meaningful to the people involved, that is it resonates emotionally with their values and aspirations; and it has to be plausible, in that sense that it is actually possible, given one’s capabilities and understanding of the environment.
Many strategies and visions do not fulfill these conditions and so are not meaningful. Some “strategies” don’t even consider different options for the deployment of resources and so are basically a cut/paste of current behavior. Some visions specify the most beautiful world-changing goals—end poverty, solve climate change…—while failing to specify what is the organization’s relationship with those external conditions. In such situations, the “strategy” or “vision” boils down to an empty wishlist.
The most compelling visions will appear as an almost unattainable point on the horizon, barely within the realm of plausibility. Elon Musk has such a vision: permanent human settlement on Mars. For most people, such a vision would be so fantastical as to be ridiculous. In Musk’s case, the vision works because it is appropriate to his character, track record, and capacities as the CEO of SpaceX. Investing billions of his own money into the project (when this was still a perfectly risky venture with a high chance of failure), reducing the cost of spacebound payload by an order of magnitude, and routine use of reusable rockets all suggest that his vision of a Mars base is not a bluff, nor, perhaps, a mirage.
An organization’s strategy and vision need not be grandiose and absolutely should be concrete and appropriate to where it currently is. For a political organization, the initial vision may be as simple as modernizing its website and digital tools, and developing key relationships. An individual’s personal vision may be as simple as getting a job they love and are made for.
The importance of vision is perhaps best expressed by visionary leaders themselves. Steve Jobs, in pioneering the development of personal computers and smartphones, transforming several industries, and turning Apple into the most valuable company in the world, was without a doubt such a visionary leader. Consider what he has to say about the importance of vision to both leadership and team members’ autonomy:
The greatest people are self-managing. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it and they don’t need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision; and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision.
And again in another interview, on how vision sustains a team:
There needs to be someone who is the keeper and reiterator of the vision, because there’s a ton of work to do and a lot of times when you have to walk a thousand miles and you take the first step it looks like a long ways. And it really helps if there’s someone there saying: “Well, we’re one step closer. The goal definitely exists; it’s not just a mirage out there.” So in a thousand-and-one little and sometimes larger ways, the vision needs to be reiterated. I do that a lot.
A paradox here becomes apparent: the vision needs to be specific enough to guide real-world action and flexible enough to remain relevant in the necessarily changing and uncertain conditions of the futur
A vision is a mere “mirage” when the goals are actually unrealizable. This can be for a variety of reasons, but most fundamentally this occurs when there is a fundamental misappreciation of one’s capabilities and/or of what is possible in the environment.1
A personal or organizational vision also has to be relevant to that person or organization. It has to guide and structure day-to-day activities in some fashion.2 The best strategies will, through a deep understanding of one’s capacities and the environment, lead to one to be ready for upcoming decisive moments and seize the greatest opportunities, and thus realize one’s vision.
Predicting the future with precision is of course virtually impossible. Nonetheless, an understanding of your sector’s history can be a source of invaluable insight. Again consider this 1981 interview with Jobs:
Jobs compares the development of computers with that of previous technologies: electric motors started out as very large and expensive, thus being few in number and only for largescale work, but gradually got smaller and cheaper, making innumerable smallscale personal uses possible. From these basic observations, Jobs could say that computers would get smaller and cheaper, and thus personal computing would eventually become widespread. And that was his vision for Apple: to lead the wave of personal computing, a technology he was convinced would change the world.
In short, Jobs used knowledge of history to understand his sector’s trajectory up to the present, identify principles governing its evolution, and think analogously to forecast future trends and opportunities.3
Most of us will not be as insightful or driven as Steve Jobs, but all of us can meaningfully shape our personal destinies and those of our organizations. Everyone needs a strategy to fulfill their goals and every great leader needs a vision: a strategy and vision that emotionally resonate with their team’s values, have a realistic appreciation of their capabilities, and which, through insightful analysis of the environment, deploy these capabilities most effectively.
Totalitarian dictatorships often provide the best examples of disaster caused by misalignment between the capacities of a state, even in a totalitarian regime, and the possibilities of the environment. Adolf Hitler overestimated Germany’s capacities in seeking to both impose a brutal ethnic hegemony over the Slavs in eastern Europe and declare war on the United States. In so doing, he brought defeat and disaster upon both himself and his country.
The first page of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book specifies his vision for a China leading the way “in the era in which imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is advancing to world-wide victory” (Quotations of Mao Tse-Tung [Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967], p. i). Assuming the vision was sincere, suffice to say that Mao did not understand the incapacity of communist central planning to create prosperity, nor the fact that the end of colonialism did not mean the end of capitalism. Tens of millions of Chinese died as a result of Mao’s misapprehensions and, after he passed away, China made a decisive and remarkably successful shift capitalism.
One’s ultimate strategic vision does not necessarily need to be intimately related to day-to-day work. After World War II, the West-German leader Konrad Adenauer made European reunification a kind of overarching narrative thread and historical horizon for his country. In 1956, he spoke of the need for a united Europe in typically visionary terms:
‘The greatest thoughts spring from the heart’ is a famous saying. And we, too, must let the great thought of a united Europe spring from our hearts if it is to materialize. Not as though the unity of Europe were a matter of the emotions, of sentiment, but rather in the sense that a firm heart, dedicated to a great task, can give us the strength to carry out in the face of all difficulties what our reason has recognized as right.
While Adenauer’s policy was never in contradiction with European integration, and the vision of a united Europe was symbolically important, it must be said that during his term of office its day-to-day reality was modest, essentially a free trade area.
Similarly, Kissinger says in the introduction to his latest book Leadership:
The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant. Even then, the strategist must choose analogies carefully, for no one can, in any real sense, experience the past; one can only imagine it as if ‘by the moonlight of memory’, in the phrase of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.