Why Great Leadership Is More Than Just Typical Vision and Mission Statements

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Every now and then, I sit back and ask myself: what is Super Scaling?

It’s a kind of question that many entrepreneurs should ask, if they are aware of the implications of that very question. It means you are thinking about your business. It means you are building a foundation for many more years to come. It means you are thinking about your core purpose.

The problem these days is that people are jaded by the idea of a vision and mission. I think it’s because they seem to generate skepticism. I mean, you might see the vision of a company emblazoned on the walls like “being number 1 in delivering the best in class technology”. But your procurement department might be trying to haggle the lowest prices and purchasing the cheapest things out there leading to inferior technology.

I get it. But I still think it’s crucial to see the purpose for it. I would go so far as to say that it is (i) motivational, (ii) improves focus, (iii) provides clarity, (iv) offers a scaffold for action, and (v) helps you to materialize your vision.

What did it take for Neil Armstrong to make that one giant leap for mankind and land on the moon in 1969? Why was it such an iconic moment that rallied people and brought a sense of pride to a nation? In fact, why did it even happen? I scratched my head at one point because if this were the absolute case of national pride, surely other nations, even Singapore, should have launched a rocket into outer space. So on deeper thought, it was not just about the result of landing, but the way the result was orchestrated. It allowed a huge organization to work better together.

According to IOP.org,

“It took eight years, 10 practice-run missions, more than 400,000 engineers, scientists and technicians, and in today’s money roughly £150bn to make the first tentative steps on another planetary body.”

Likewise, in the whole of South-East Asia, all countries fought for independence. Singapore did not – it was the only country that was independent due to being booted out of the Federation of Malaya. But the transforming of a country from the backwaters of a fishing port into a modern state that rivals many of the top cities in the world, surely is a feat on its own. This arguably took around 40 years.

I’ve spoken to a lot of founders and entrepreneurs about what they feel it takes to build a scalable business.

Many cite perseverance. Hard work. Drive. Maybe even business goal setting.

Yet, to be able to achieve these feats at the scale that they happened probably took a lot more than just hard work.

The gargantuan task of putting the man on the moon couldn’t have been done with just the efforts of Armstrong alone. This process began when John F. Kennedy floated a bold idea to light the collective imagination of a 400,000-person organization. His vision captured the hearts and minds of not just the NASA employees, but the entire country.

The toxic mix of racial riots and the political disagreement between Lee Kuan Yew and Tengku Abdul Rahman led to Singapore’s eventual unflattering expulsion from Malaysia. It was a shattering defeat as Lee Kuan Yew said in a Discovery documentary:

“We were forced to leave. It was very painful. Many people were let down. I rallied them, mobilised them, they trusted us… we let them down.”

But together with a team of educated people who believed in the cause, Lee Kuan Yew was able to paint the picture of vision that became an aspiration for the hungry workers in 1965. Stability. Integration. Infrastructure. Progression. All these became the keystone for Singapore’s progress as a natural consequence of taking care of the people in spite of the circumstances.

Creating a Moonshot

What drives moonshots?

Andrew M. Carton, a Wharton professor of Management, studied internal NASA memos and documents to understand how employees throughout NASA, with vastly different roles, were able to rally around the common goal of a lunar landing and made this observation: NASA employees were deeply inspired by JFK’s persuasive rhetoric, down to the janitors, one of whom even believed that his work held meaning because of it. It was not about mopping the floor anymore – it was about making the place clean so that his colleagues could do their best work.

The fledgling state of Singapore back in 1963 encountered one of its most bloody racial riots resulting in 38 dead and hundreds injured… a heavy price to pay for a small state that relied on its people. And yet, through his and his colleagues’ efforts, produced a stellar record by understanding what to do and their priorities. I think Lee Kuan Yew is summed up by Ray Dalio in his 2017 comment:

Lee Kuan Yew is a remarkable man because he took basically a mosquito infested backwater in which he’s in the middle of the heroin drug trade triangle and he created a vision, built out that vision in which it would be the place in Asia that companies wanted to be in, that families could be raised in, from people from around the world. In order to do that he had to have… a vision in which there was a… strictness … of what a good citizen was… he built out that good citizenship… in a way which respected all the different cultures.. [And] differences in people so people… could be educated.

On one hand, one vision is propelled by a positive motivational direction. On the other, a vision was crafted out of desperation and a deep duty to help the people to survive and thrive.

In your business, your ability to connect the dreams and fears of those around you to a meaningful aspiration would most certainly help you to galvanize your people to do their best work, sometimes even being able to see the impossible become possible.

Focus Enables Your Mission

When NASA was founded in 1958, it had three goals:

Improve space technology to meet national interests in space
Achieve preeminence in space for the United States, and
Advance science by exploring the solar system

These goals were ambitious, but suffered from one critical flaw: they were too open-ended to provide a clear focus by which the team at NASA could rally around. JFK reduced them to a single focus: send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth. This became the single overriding aspiration that governed all of NASA’s efforts.

Lee Kuan Yew had many goals to accomplish. Without focusing on a rallying call, it would have been useless to aim for these goals. Instead, he made it clear that his political party was to lead for the good of all, and that decisions would have to be made on the majority rather than the minority. In the 1959 victory rally, Lee said this:

“We have no personal future apart from your future. Your joys and your sorrows are ours. We share the same future be it good, indifferent or bad. And so it is our duty to see that it is a bright and a cheerful future.”

Imagine a place that was ravaged by racial hostilities. Now, picture what it is like for someone to speak about the duty of working to a shared, better future. This served as a rallying call not just for the people to feel connected with its political leaders, but also to the leaders themselves to focus on service to the people.

In business, your leadership effectiveness will determine what you should do and what you should not do. There is a difference between having goals and believing in them so deeply that you are compelled to do it. A vision statement does not make people inspired. It is the leader who speaks the truth in that vision statement who does.

Specificity Provides Clarity

On May 25, 1961, Kennedy told the U.S Congress: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

Despite being a goal that was literally 240,000 miles away, this was an important milestone because what JFK did was to articulate a concrete objective. This objective was specific and time-bound. It became the single focus of NASA for the eight and half years that followed.

Studies have shown that one key way to increase team unity and commitment is by making goals more concrete, rather than more abstract.

The highly-concrete goal of landing a man on the moon felt more tangible and achievable to people, instead of a lofty, ambiguous one such as advancing science by exploring the solar system. Concreteness meant that people couldn’t lose sight of what they were ultimately trying to achieve. This meant that they could be continued to be invigorated by the goal.

Likewise, during Lee Kuan Yew’s first national day rally speech, he reflected upon the divisive experience Singapore had from the merger to the racial riots down to being kicked out of Malaysia. But those circumstances did not really change the vision:

“…we set out to build a multiracial for sometime a multilingual or multicultural community to give a satisfying life to the many different kinds of people… Integration is possible: not to make us one gray mass against our will against our feelings against our inclinations but to integrate us with common values, common attitudes, a common outlook, certainly a common language and eventually a common culture.”

LKY’s words suggest that there is a specific mix of values, attitudes and outlook to establish culture. While it might be obvious to many of us today, it was not a common rhetoric at that time to emphasize values over results.While JFK’s approach was specific in terms of a more tangible focus (man on the moon and safely back), LKY’s was a specific in terms of the cultural outcome of a satisfying integration.

A worthy vision enables people to move forward in spite of the challenges it faces because it is specific enough that they can do so with clarity. In your business, your vision depends on your context and your own drives and motivations. But when your employees can sense that it is meaningful, it will attract more people to you whom believe in your cause.

One Step at a Time

Another masterful stroke of JFK’s leadership was his ability to break down large goals into smaller milestones. By doing this, he could allow people to connect their day-to-day work with the larger organisational objectives.

Prior to 1961, NASA only had one program – Mercury. It was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. However, that was a very broad program, and with the recommendation of then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, JFK made a key decision to create the Manned Lunar Landing Program.

The Manned Lunar Landing Program was made up of 3 programs – not just Mercury – with key milestones for each program:

Mercury: to put a person in Earth’s orbit
Gemini: to perform docking in space
Apollo: to build all remaining capabilities needed to land on the moon

With this structure, JFK created 3 main milestones that cascaded upwards into the ultimate goal of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to Earth. NASA employees could clearly understand how these three milestones provided a clear path to the ultimate objective and could rally behind them.

Lee Kuan Yew’s challenge was multifold – possibly to numerous to count. However, it was apparent that in order to get a country in order he had three strategic imperatives.

Ensure racial harmony. This would have the downstream effect of stability and positively impact the flow of business and transportation.
Manage the country’s defenses. By creating a citizen army, it enabled every able man to be trained as a soldier in order to improve the confidence of citizens and investors in the country.
Educate the people. It was apparent that the path to prosperity was about education. The government then developed teachers for schools and eventually made secondary education free at the time.

With the foundations of stability and growth, the capabilities of the fledgling nation improved and led to a booming metropolis that it is today. Indeed, these lessons of Singapore probably show the way to building a scalable business! Get the right people in, put yourself in a prudent disposition, and develop a growth mindset so that people find themselves meaningfully employed to do their best work together.

Making Ideas Real

Both JFK and Lee Kuan Yew had ways to bring perspective to actions.

JFK said at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas, in 1962 he said:

“Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon . . . because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone . . . space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.”

This not only reframed the action of just getting to the moon, but even demonstrated the fact that doing it had peripheral benefits that serve to sharpen the capabilities of the nation.

LKY, on the other hand, was more pragmatic. He once said that he made statements about progress only based on the written fact. But this also functions as proof of the vision and an objective measure of trust.

When one’s ideas in business fall flat, admitting it and moving forward is a difficult but necessary thing to do. Surely there is a lot of shame, embarrassment and pain! Yet, successful entrepreneurs, and indeed leaders of nations, have found that honest and authentic communication often engenders even more trust from the people working with and for you.

Translating the idea into reality is about showing the logic of its benefits after the fact. It helps to show that what you planned or envisioned was not a fluke, but a validated way of thinking supported by the fact of the matter. This is the reason why reporting and scorecards are important for you as a founder and entrepreneur. It also means that others who work with you can see you transparently. Trust can therefore be formed.

Inspire… With a Vision!

JFK’s vision was so compelling that it led to one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

LKY’s vision was so powerful that it took a fishing port to become one of the greatest cities in the world.

This is incredibly difficult to achieve because the main paradox of inspiring employees is how the humdrum of their daily responsibilities often contrast starkly with the vast scale of the organization’s aspirations. Leaders who are able to do this and help employees see how their work can be more meaningful are vastly more effective in their leadership.

Commonplace management practices often simply revolve around company visions, mission statements, and speeches. JFK and LKY have shown these to be practices that do not work in isolation. Work is more meaningful when people’s daily responsibilities have broader significance. When this is possible, individuals can thrive even amongst challenging tasks and low wages.

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