ESG Webinar – Visionary Leadership

The Executive Study Group (ESG) webinar named “Visionary Leadership – How to Lead Use Vision to Lead Staff to Come out of Comfort Zones” was held by Asia Pacific Institute for Strategy Limited (APIFS) on 2^nd Feb 2004. Dr. Mark Lee introduced the history and goal of Asia Pacific Institute for Strategy Limited (APIFS) firstly. Then he briefed webinar contents including “The Trap of Comfort Zones”, “The 4 Powers of Vision” and how to design your vision, etc. 

In the beginning, Dr. Mark Lee quoted a case of French Yellow Pages that was in trouble in 2009 because of online competitor such as Google, Craigslist and Yelp. Their new CEO Mr. Jean-Pierre Remy recognized two success factors that i) Had a trusted brand and ii) Strong relationships with its advertisers. Then he rediscovered corporate vision “connecting small businesses to local customers”.

Then Mr. Jean-Pierre developed 5-year goal announcement and provided a clear way that digital revenues as a share of total revenues to measure progress. He repeated to communicate with employees and gave credits to heritages, as well as enhancing new skills. The most important is people buy-in the vision. By 2013, four years after Remy announced his new digital vision and company had nearly met its transformation goals.

The first polling about the trap of comfort zones and there were five reasons that voted similar importance. The sequence was Fear of Failure (28%), Lack of Incentives (24%), Resource Constraints (18%), Rigid Culture (18%) and Unclear Goals (13%).

After that Dr. Lee introduced the 4 Powers of Vision to break comfort zone and they were i) Direction, ii) Innovation, iii) Motivation and iv) Decision Making. 

For the first power “Direction”, he quoted Louis V. Gerstner (Chairman, IBM) transformation case and vision is most important. Because a vision stimulates think-out-of-the-box mindset. IBM vision is “Let’s build a Smarter Planet”. 

Then the polling 2 was performed for the 4 powers of vision and the sequence was found Motivation (35%), Direction (34%), Innovation (20%) and Decision Making (11%).

After that he shared some cases such as KONE delivers the best People Flow experience. Lee Kum Kee mission is “Carry forward China’s excellent food culture” (發揚中華優秀飲食文化) and also quoted Mark Parker (President & CEO, NIKE) who feared company become big and bureaucratic that he created a sense of urgency. Then he proposed a new vision related to digital.

Finally, we voted the three companies’ vision designs as follow.

i)                   UNIQLO, a new-style Japanese firm making good casual clothes available for all to wear.

ii)                 VTech’s mission is to be the most cost effective designer and manufacturer of innovative, high quality consumer electronics products and to distribute them to markets worldwide in the most efficient manner.

iii)               Cirque du Soleil is an international organization founded in Quebec dedicated to the creation, production, and performance of artistic works whose mission is to invoke the imagination, to provoke the senses and to evoke the emotions of people around the world.

Dr. Mark Lee then discussed how to personalize your vision to discover your competitive advantages that need to identify some strategic assets that build on your strengths and engage employees. He introduced four types of strategic assets including Physical assets, Competence-based assets, Intangible assets and data assets. 

At the end, Dr. Lee performed a last poll for the challenges of designing a vision. Most participants selected “Integrating personal values with corporate objectives” (34%).

Reference:

Asia Pacific Institute for Strategy Limited (亞太策略研究所有限公司) – www.apifs.org

ESG facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/esg08

Previous talks summary:

https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/search/label/Executive%20Study%20Group