What’s your vision: Answer 3 simple questions
Keeping it simple seems to be the philosophy of some of the world’s most successful companies. Google, for example, succinctly articulates its vision as, “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google’s disarmingly simple vision is an outcome-focused and action-oriented statement. The good news is that it’s not rocket science. Tomorrow Today note that the greatest organisations and leaders follow a simple model – the “3i’s”.
The first “I” is Impact, the second is Impossible, and the third is Inspiration.
How do we model the 3i’s in our own business? We ask ourselves three questions:
1. What are the big problems in my world of influence?
2. How can I use breakthrough thinking or technology to challenge conventional wisdom and achieve what people consider impossible?
3. What is my moonshot (an inspirational outcome focused destination)?
A few months back I presented a talk in Europe to Kyocera executives from all over the world. I believed that I answered question 1 by noting that South Africa is a challenging environment to do business in. In a broader sense, the digitisation of the economy has meant that we have to change our mindsets about business processes. Therefore, to answer question 2, we fully automated a very manual and paper driven HR process when the employee resigned. Only through my conviction of us becoming a paperless company, could the decision be made. This took tremendous courage to accomplish this innovative feat. We are now well on our way to going paperless and I would guess we are 80% there with about 60% of our processes.
In terms of question 3, my biggest dream is to double our annual turnover in the next five years. I know this is possible. Despite the real challenges South Africa and Africa face, it’s still the land of significant opportunity.
So now that I have shared my leadership vision with you, I invite you to consider and conceptualise yours. Remember the 3i’s and use the questions as a guide.
Werner Engelbrecht - General Manager - KYOCERA Document Solutions South Africa
