Are we execution-obsessed?

Are we getting so good at executing that we forget about the vision piece?

At first, I balked at this. My entire business premise is built around helping CEOs execute. Indeed, without execution, what does vision actually do for us?

But upon further reflection, I think he’s onto something.

When we become obsessed with execution—and the metrics that signal its success—do we lose sight of the softer edges of vision?

What about the non-quantifiable impact of improving customers’ lives? Creating a joyful place for employees to do their best work? Experiencing the exhilaration of innovating something completely new?

You might say we could try to measure those things, too. And we probably could. But the point of vision isn’t just to describe a concrete outcome. It’s to activate the imagination.

I may be losing you with the word imagination in a conversation about business and strategy. So let’s reframe it: thinking about the future and what could be.

I’m sure you’d agree that, as business leaders, we must do that. So let’s continue.

In retreats with leadership teams, I often facilitate a vision exercise. I’ve done away with traditional “vision statements” because they tend to be relatively useless.

We’ve all seen them. You could probably boil many of them down to one bland—but perhaps compelling—statement:

To make the world a better place.

Sure. I hope we all can. But that generic statement doesn’t create a North Star for leaders to guide their teams toward. And that’s really the point of vision: to give us a faraway point to aspire to reach.

So instead of vision statements, we create future paragraphs.

We ask: What will it feel like to work here? What new markets will we be in? What will customers say about us? What will we be known for? What will we have stopped doing?

We place the horizon far enough in the distance that it feels a little fuzzy, but not so far away that people can’t grapple with it.

Once the team writes down all the ways their company will be different—or perhaps intentionally the same—in the future, we cover the walls with those ideas and debate them.

Then it’s my job that night to turn their ideas into the future paragraph.

I believe the future paragraph gives leadership teams something incredibly important: a picture of what they are executing toward.

Of course, it should be detailed enough to paint that picture but written in pencil, not Sharpie. We have to remain nimble. Markets change. Customers change. Technology changes. Opportunities emerge that we couldn’t have predicted.

But maybe my CEO friend helped me see something I hadn’t articulated quite this way before: execution without vision is just motion.

We can hit the milestones. Track the KPIs. Finish the initiatives. Check every box on the 90-day plan. But if we haven’t spent enough time imagining where all that activity is supposed to take us, we risk becoming exceptionally good at moving without being entirely sure we’re moving in the right direction.

Strategy needs both.

We need the discipline to execute what matters today and the imagination to keep asking what could be tomorrow.

Maybe that’s the real work of leadership: see farther, then set it in motion.