How Positive Leadership can help you achieve a bold vision

Welcome to the Positive Leadership newsletter. This month, we look at how Positive Leadership can help you to achieve a bold vision.

We all want to be in control of our lives and where we want to end up. That doesn't mean it's all planned out. But it also doesn't mean that we shouldn't allow ourselves to have a bold vision.

The impact investor, Sir Ronald Cohen once said to me, "If you think big, you achieve big." You might think that’s easier to say than to do. And you'd be right. It takes focus, courage, grit (and some luck) to bring a vision to life. But it's not impossible.

Far from it, argues Dorie Clark , in her book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. An executive educator at Columbia Business School , best-selling author, and expert on reinvention, Dorie champions the power of long-term thinking. When I spoke with her recently, she framed her thinking with a quote from my former boss, Bill Gates : "Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade."

Dorie put this into practice herself in 2016, when she decided to set a 10-year goal to become a musical theater writer. She had no experience whatsoever, but she truly believed that she could "go from zero experience to extreme proficiency over the course of a decade if I applied myself diligently". 8 years later and Dorie is working towards Broadway with her show Absolute Zero!

Dorie's approach is to laser-focus on one step at a time, believing all the way that you’ll get there. A tool that many people find helpful is creating a vision board. Having a picture, literally on the wall, of the kind of life you want to live or the things you want to accomplish can increase your chances of getting there by over 40% because it primes your brain to seize opportunities that might otherwise pass you by.

This is a technique recommended by neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart Bieber , who shared three simple steps with me:

1. Create a vision board with images and words representing your goals.
2. Place it somewhere you frequently see it to continually prime your brain to remember and work towards these goals.
3. Ensure the board is organized in a way that is meaningful to you and leaves space for new opportunities.

Listen to my conversation with Tara for more tips on vision and visualization here:

A vision is rarely, if ever, achieved alone. You have to persuade others to join you on the journey.

For instance, when Indra Nooyi took charge of PepsiCo she embarked on a vision to unite financial success with social responsibility. She called it "performance with purpose," a vision that required an almost evangelical style of communication:

To me, big transformational programs like the one we embarked on require you to have missionary zeal yourself as a CEO. You've got to get the message out, you've got to be visible, whether it's by video, whether it's in person, you've got to be the missionary.

It’s a big task to sell a vision to thousands of employees, but Indra was successful because she understood the power of a story told authentically. By tailoring her communication to each audience, “with examples that touch their hearts”, she reached a point where she no longer had to convince employees, “they were convincing themselves and their people as to why this was the right thing to do.”

Listen to Indra’s incredible leadership journey here:

It’s one thing to change a company, but how do you go even further and change the world?

For Fred Swaniker , founder and CEO of the African Leadership Group , it’s about identifying an opportunity and then building a movement that shares your values for the greater good. The opportunity Fred identified in Africa is a growing young population and a huge leadership gap.

His bold vision is to train 3 million leaders by 2035, which he compares to building a cathedral:

I see my work as a cathedral builder, and I want all the leaders that we're developing to think of themselves as cathedral builders. We're building the Cathedral of Africa… We'll lay a foundation. We’ll create this generation of leaders, and they will hopefully do great things on the continent. They will bring better healthcare and better education and better governance to people, to hundreds of millions of people in Africa.

But even they will come to the end of their life and there will still be work to be done. But a hundred years from now, 200 years from now, the continent will be this incredible, beautiful, prosperous continent with good healthcare, good housing, everything that we consider makes a good life. I hope that we would have made a small contribution to build the foundation for that to happen.

This is a wonderful metaphor that as a Frenchman I really relate to. In my home city of Paris, we are rebuilding Notre Dame after the devastating fire of 2019. For almost 700 years the cathedral has represented the highest aims of the human spirit. One way of thinking about its legacy is in the words of architect Léon Krier who said, “a city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.” Now, apply this idea to the world and think: what vision of mine can make a meaningful contribution to the human story?

I hope this newsletter has inspired you to think and achieve big things for yourself, others, and the world.

All the best.

-jp