Visionary Leader 

Become the visionary leader: the leader who is able to lead people to success and help them avoid the mistakes that lead to failure.

– Model the success of big businesses.

– Know the causes of failure.

– Convey your vision.

– Root a strong corporate culture.

– Build a long-lasting business.

The Visionary Leader.

The fourth step in your leadership journey is the visionary leader.

The visionary leader is one who has the ability to guide people to success in business and to help them avoid failure.

He is a leader who has “his feet on the ground” and “his head in the sky”: he is both a realist and an idealist, knows the (and has learned from) past and present, and has a clear vision for the future. That is why we call him the Visionary Leader.

1) Business Success.

How do you create a successful business?

What makes a business successful for 50, 100 or 150 years?

How does a “good” business become “excellent”?

How do some businesses succeed even in times of uncertainty, chaos, and crisis?

What is the secret recipe?

Studies conducted in the United States have shown repeatedly that the No. 1 factor in business success is a strong, shared corporate culture: an enduring set of values, beliefs, and core principles shared within the company in order to pursue a common essential purpose.

With shared knowledge and awareness of this solid culture, the historically most successful businesses have experienced an internal balance/tension between preserving core values (the corporate culture) and fostering innovation.

They have been distinguished by a long-term view of business, rather than a short-term mindset. These businesses have adopted a mindset whereby “It’s always day one” (as Jeff Bezos would say): the entrepreneurial spirit of “day one” must always be alive and active, and no one in the company can rest on the laurels of past successes; to be in “day two” is to be already in the self-satisfaction that risks leading to failure.

Your task as a leader is therefore to create a shared corporate culture rooted in the reality of the business and based on the company’s DNA.

The course has drawn inspiration and knowledge from the experience of great businessmen of the past and present and the companies they have run: Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Bill Gates at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at Apple, Ray Dalio at Bridgewater Associates, Thomas Watson at IBM, David Packard and Bill Hewlett at HP, Sam Walton at Walmart, Howard Shultz at Starbucks.

You will discover how many principles and strategies are universal and are applicable to small or medium-sized companies and even non-corporate organizations.

The first part (Business Success) of the Visionary Leader course is 3 days long.

2) Business Failure.

“Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.”

– Edmund Burke, Irish statesman, writer and philosopher.

Economic and business history has shown that there are “proven strategies” for failure. They are available to the careful observer on a par with strategies for success. Knowing these strategies from beforehand enables leaders and managers to recognize them in time and avoid them, steering the company’s rudder in the right direction.

Through the principle of inversion (fruitfully used by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger), if we want to succeed, we must ask “inverse” questions:

“How can a company fail?”

“How can once “invincible” companies decline?”

“How can once highly successful companies at some point fail dramatically, become irrelevant or fall into oblivion?”

“What are the strategies of failure?”

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I avoid going there.”

– Charlie Munger, U.S. businessman and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Knowing how businesses fail is just as important as knowing how they succeed.

As a visionary leader you will therefore need to know the root causes of substantial business death, taking cues from historical cases, with the goal of recognizing these causes before they occur in your business. In some historical cases, early recognition of the signs of decline enabled leaders to change course and direct the company to new successes.

Case studies of companies that have declined include Xerox in the late 1970s, A&P in the 1960s-80s, Scott Paper in the 1970s-80s, Salomon Brothers in 1991, Motorola in the late 1990s, Kodak in the 1990s and early 2000s, Nokia in the early 2000s, and Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Some companies have been on the verge of decline, but have been able to produce profound internal change and excel again: IBM in the 1990s, Apple in the late 1990s, Starbucks in 2008, Philips in 2010-2011 are some of the cases of companies that have been able to recover and renew themselves, setting an example and hope for future businesses to follow the same path.

“The wise learn from the mistakes of others. The fools from his own.”

– Benjamin Franklin, writer, inventor, diplomat and founding father of the U.S.A.

This second part (Business Failure) of the Visionary Leader course has a duration of 3 days, with an intensive formula.