Sit and Watch Your Life Reel Through!

I love sports. My interest in sports pushed me to know the rules of many sport events that I would never participate in or probably never witness others playing. In particular, like 75% of the 170 million people in my country, I love football. I so love football that I used to sit long periods at a time discussing the players’ rumors, the possible transfer headlines, the problem with referees and lots more. Sometimes our discussion leads us on journeys back in the days and we vividly describe events that happened then.

Recently in one of such discussions we traveled back in time to the world cup event of 1994 – US ’94 it was popularly called – and discussed the many euphoric moments. Our country was represented for the first time on the biggest football stage on the planet. We went there as African champions and I vividly remember thinking – rather erroneously with hindsight - that we would be certainly unstoppable after gloriously conquering Africa just some months earlier.

Suddenly it dawned on me that this sports event I was vividly describing was twenty years ago! Where had all the time gone? Twenty years! If this was US ’94 then I am twenty years in the future. The obvious question that arose was, “Was this the future I envisioned?” I refused to answer not because I didn’t know the right answer but because I didn’t want to hear it.

Our lives do not come to us all at once. I remember my father describing fifty-year-old events “as though it were just yesterday.” Our lives come in years, and years in months, and months in weeks, and weeks in days, and days in hours, and hours in minutes and seconds. It stands to reason that what you do with the seconds – the very second you are living through right now – determines what will be the outcome of the results you will produce in the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and ultimately in your life.

If the next twenty years – 2034 – would bring better outcomes I must ask myself the difficult question, “What am I doing with this second?” It is the same with you and your friends and your family. We have all the power to choose what we do with this second but we have no power whatsoever to determine the outcomes we would experience in the next twenty years.

Choose wisely.

Corporate Vision: Begin With Your Vision

Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. ­– Jesus (The Christ)

If you want to develop corporate vision you must first have a vision! This may seem simplistic, or at best, obvious, but, many desire to build corporate vision on the foundation of no vision at all. They are the blind leading the blind. We have a lot of such all around us.

Vision is to see ahead. It means to capture a picture that others do not initially have. Vision goes beyond physical sight to mental sight. It was Helen Keller who said, “The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision.” Without first having a deeply and thoroughly engrained vision you cannot get any sensible folks to share it with you. In a prior article, The Blind Man inFront, I noted that it was impossible to lead without seeing clearly where you are headed.

When you decide to build corporate vision you are offering to be a guide to the folks you are working with. You must be willing to guide them through every stage of the vision. To guide means to show the way to others. It means to intentionally influence the growth and development of others. You become a pilot, and mentor, and chaperone to your people.

In addition, your vision must be people-focused. Folks want to know how the fulfillment of your vision will lead to their fulfilling theirs. No one wants to remain stagnated and so in the event that your vision does nothing to add to them they will join the next bus away from you and your self-centered vision. A people-focused vision goes hand-in-hand with a visionary who is willing to teach the nitty-gritties of every aspect of the vision.

Finally, you must have clearly understood and believed in your vision to build a corporate one. Many seek the help of others in a vision they have not clearly understood and believed in themselves. They want others to do the work for them and so they fail again and again in developing corporate vision.

     {To order for my new book, Do it Like Kids, click here}

When you have given the right place for these areas you stand a far better chance of getting folks to buy into your vision and in turn developing a corporate vision.

Corporate Visions

And God said, “Let US make man in our image, after our likeness.” ­– God

Fact: Dreams come true. That dreams come true isn’t a statement that needs all-night research to prove any longer. Many folks have dreamed and seen their dreams come to pass. Others that did not live to see it happen left it deeply engrained in the hearts of many that people watched out to see it happen.

Fact: Big dreams are BIGGER than their dreamers. A careful analysis of big dreams will show you that they usually are bigger than their carriers – the dreamers. This is so because big dreams aren’t self-centered or myopic. They carry as many people – sometimes systems or whole nations’ ideologies – under their umbrella.  The dreamer is simply a part of the dream and not the whole.

Fact: Big dreams need teams. For significant dreams to come true you need a collection of people. A team must be built around the vision. Individual vision isn’t enough, you need corporate vision. Sometimes we want to run all alone so that we can be the only person praised but praise isn’t enough to outweigh the numerous advantages of corporate vision. Corporate vision does a lot:

1. Diversifies the initial idea and open up a world of possibilities that weren’t thought of.

2. Makes financial resources less difficult to access.

3. Makes mental resources readily available.

4. Ensures that many smaller dreams come to pass.

5.   Makes the process of actualization fun.

6.   Releases the potential of a lot of people.

7.   Fosters unity.

8.   Challenges people to grow and develop mentally.

9.    Reduces the stress that would have been on one person.

10.Makes room for expertise and skill development.

11.Builds up leaders and leadership.

12.Multiplies the speed at which goals are achieved.

13.Diminishes the probability of failure.

    {To order for my new book, Do it Like Kids, click here}

You would agree that developing corporate vision is important to your goals. I would, in the next few articles, focus on how to develop corporate vision for each goal you set.