Virtue:
Foresight
Other names:
Definition:
Goal setting and prioritizing
"ability to order means to ends that are to be realized in the future" (Freddoso)
Advice:
"...say no to almost everything. Billionaire Warren Buffett once said, ‘The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.’ And James Altucher colorfully gave Kruse this tip: ‘If something is not a 'Hell, yeah!' then it's a no.’ (Blackberry #9)
"follow the 80/20 rule. Known as the Pareto Principle, in most cases, 80 percent of results come from only 20 percent of activities. Ultra-productive people know which activities drive the greatest results. Focus on those and ignore the rest" (Bradberry #10)
Pursue your own goals (Corley #6)
"What's the ONE THING I can do in the next 12 months such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?" (Keller)
“If you are working from your inbox, you are working on other people’s priorities” (Rumsford)
Empirical Research:
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Negligence, "a lack of due solicitude stemming from a lack of a prompt will" (Freddoso)
Inconstancy (or irresoluteness), "withdrawal from a definite good purpose stemming from the passion of desire" (Freddoso)
Case Study 1
ReplyDeleteIn his book Entrepreneurial Life, Robert Luddy, president of CaptiveAir, discusses the role of foresight, a part of the virtue of prudence, in his own financial success.
"Entrepreneurs make many daring decisions, but they must be well thought out and executed. Sometimes they are so bold that people don’t realize how much work went into the planning. Our sales reached $6 million for the year 1985, and we were ranked #65 on the Inc. 500 list. I informed our sales force that I had a plan to achieve $25 million in sales within five years. The large sales target was astounding to them at the time. Most of our team dismissed this goal as unattainable, but it became a reality. Steve Luddy was the first to join the millionaires’ club (selling one million dollars worth of product in a single year), followed by Lonnie Grant and Dennis Jaynes. In 1986 we reached #43 on the Inc. 500 list." (Luddy, Entrepreneurial Life, ch.3)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteDomino's founder Tom Monaghan describes some of his goal-setting practices in his autobiography, Pizza Tiger. "Writing is the key to my system of goal setting; but goal setting sounds too ordinary to describe what I have in mind. What I'm doing is building exciting dreams. The goals must be exciting or people won't be motivated to strive for them. I carry a yellow legal pad with me wherever I go. All my thoughts, my plans, my dreams, my analyses of problems - everything that comes into my mind, sometimes even a shopping list - are written down on my current pad. When one is full, I start another; I sometimes have several pads going at once for different kinds of thoughts. I learned this method from my old friend Chuck Parsons, an Ann Arbor-based marketing consultant. Over the last twenty years I accumulated dozens of packing boxes filled with these pads - I finally threw them away because they were taking up too much room, and I never look at them again once I'm finished writing, anyhow. The reason is that it's the process of writing that's important to me. It's the thinking that goes into the writing, not the words that wind up on the paper, that makes the difference.
"I set long-range goals, annual goals, monthly goals, weekly goals and daily goals. The daily goals take the form of to-do lists. The long-range goals are dream-sheets. But the other lists are specific and action-oriented. My goal list for 1980, for example, began with this entry: '500 units.' To me, that meant we should have a total of 500 stores by the end of the year. This was a high goal at that point in our development, but it was attainable. The important thing about this goal, though, is that it was specific, it wasn't just 'let's increase the number of units this year.' It was 500 or bust! If a goal is specific, it is easy to communicate it to others. This is important, because when you are dealing with a corporate goal, you have to sell it to the people who can help you achieve it: They have to understand exactly what the goal is, they must believe it can be done, and they must be convinced that it can be done by them.
"Another important aspect of my goal setting is the time limit. A task is to be done by the end of the year, not just 'in the near future.' In 1979, my list for the coming year went on for four pages, 150 items, and covered not only business goals but physical goals. I wanted to get my weight down to 156 pounds, do 200 pushups in one session every other day, get my body fat and cholesterol level down, and finish a marathon. There also were personal items, including purchase of a third car and having a meeting with Ray Kroc. Most of these goals were achieved. I fell a bit short on some, including the big one: We didn't open our five hundredth store until the following year. But falling a bit short made me fight all the harder to attain that number." (Monaghan, Pizza Tiger, pp. 239-41)
As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina recognized the need for consolidation amongst the tech companies after the end of the dot-com boom, and so decided to pursue a controversial merger with Compaq. In her memoir, Tough Choices, she explains how the virtue of foresight is key to successful management. "It will always be a CEO’s job to raise people’s sights and focus them on what’s necessary and what’s possible. A leader’s job is to sense, ahead of others, danger as well as opportunity and to lead the organization to adapt itself to both. Over time the organization would toughen and mature. By 2002, managers knew that achieving best-in-class cost structures was an ongoing part of their jobs, and so there were more job cuts in 2002, 2003, 2004, and planned (and later executed) for 2005.
ReplyDelete"In the summer of 2001 we had our regularly scheduled strategy sessions with the broader management team. It was clear to everyone that our PC business wasn’t on a path to leadership, nor was our industry-standard server business. We were far too dependent on Microsoft and Intel, yet we negotiated with them from a position of weakness because our volumes weren’t sufficient to give us the same clout as either Compaq or Dell. Our services business still lacked credibility and scale, even though we’d focused more management attention on it by asking Ann Livermore to lead our efforts. At the end of the session I stood and reiterated these observations, as well as the others we’d reached during our two days of meetings. And then I concluded by saying 'The industry we’re competing in is getting tougher. Only the strongest will survive and prevail. We’re fighting too many battles on too many fronts alone. We need either more allies or fewer fights.' Although I couldn’t yet say anything specific, I was trying to prepare the organization for what might come." (Fiorina, Tough Choices, ch. 25)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteMountaineer and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard emphasizes the importance of foresight to achieving one’s highest goals in Let My People Go Surfing. "The first part of our mission statement, 'Make the best product,' is the raison d’être of Patagonia and the cornerstone of our business philosophy. Striving to make the best quality product is the reason we got into business in the first place. We are a product-driven company, and without a tangible product there would obviously be no business and the other goals of our mission statement would thus be irrelevant. Having high-quality, useful products anchors our business in the real world and allows us to expand our mission. Because we have a history of making the best climbing tools in the world, tools that your life is dependent on, we are not satisfied making second-best clothing. Our clothes—from Baggies to flannel shirts, from underwear to outerwear—have to be the best of their kind. Trying to make the best product also inspires us to create the best child-care center and the best production department and to be the best at our jobs. 'Make the best' is a difficult goal. It doesn’t mean 'among the best' or the 'best at a particular price point.' It means 'make the best,' period." (Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing, ch. 2)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life, Donald Rumsfeld provides an example of how the virtue of foresight or goal-setting out to work in practice. “If you’ve spent time around youngsters, chances are you’ve heard them ask an adult a string of questions, one after the other, with just one word: ‘Why?’ As exhausting as it can be for someone answering ‘why’ questions over and over again, it can be a useful technique for leaders when setting goals at the strategic level.
“At Searle [a subsidiary of Pfizer], I made the decision to freeze the company’s dividend to shareholders. Why? My reason was to be able to divert more money from dividends to pharmaceutical research and development. Why? Only by increasing R&D could we have a chance of developing new pharmaceutical products and make our firm more of a long-term growth company with strong stock appreciation for the shareholders. Why? Because shareholders would benefit from capital gains as the stock price went up (and capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than dividends).
The strategic goal of Searle was to become a more successful research-and-development based pharmaceutical company. (It worked. During the eight years I served as CEO, Searle’s stock price increased by more than 500 percent and annual profits by more than 450 percent.)” (Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s Rules, p. 70)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life, Donald Rumsfeld explains how the achievement of ambitious, seemingly impossible goals rests on careful planning and prudent judgment. He offers Ronald Reagan’s clash with the Soviet Union as an example. “Shortly after he took office as the nation’s fortieth president, Ronald Reagan astonished some of the diplomatic talent around him when he turned to his national security advisor, Richard V. Allen, and declared, ‘My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose.’ At first blush, that might have sounded like bravado, or a clever line from an accomplished actor. But in fact it was a truly new, big, bold, and ambitious goal – a goal fundamentally counter to the prevalent thinking in most Western circles.
“Some in the foreign policy establishment – a number of whom has spent many years trying to reach accommodation with the Soviet empire – shook their heads in embarrassment. Many on the left, particularly during the Carter administration, had resigned themselves to U.S. parity, or coexistence, with the Soviet Union. Until Reagan, in fact, no U.S. president had expressed the conviction that a day could come when the Soviets would find themselves, as he memorably put it, ‘on the ash heap of history.’
“Most everything done in President Reagan’s administration with respect to his Cold War policy was measured against his single, unambiguous goal. In the first years of his presidency, he delayed negotiations with the Soviets so that he could first rebuild the capabilities of our country’s armed forces. When it came time to negotiate with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he was determined to do so from a position of strength. He took steps to support resistance movements in communist nations. He devised, announced, and pursued a missile defense system that the Soviets came to believe could render their nuclear arsenal less effective.
“He attacked the Soviet Union not with weapons but by articulating bold, eloquent truths, statements that were derided by some critics as ‘needlessly provocative’ and ‘dangerous.’ Despite arguments to the contrary, his decision to label the Soviet Union ‘an evil empire’ was calculated to advance his broad central goal. It sent a clear signal to the Soviet leadership that in his administration it would not be ‘business as usual.’ Over time, his words and actions contributed to a crisis of confidence within the Soviet system and gave encouragement to opponents of the Soviet empire.
“Then from a position of strength Reagan pursued initiatives that led to a fundamentally altered U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union. He encouraged their moves to greater openness and economic reform. And he watched as that inherently untenable system finally collapsed from its internal contradictions. Ronald Reagan, the widely ridiculed former actor, was one of the twentieth century’s most formidable strategists.” (Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld’s Rules, p. 73-74)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, Thinking Outside the Box: The Wine Group Story, Arthur Ciocca, founder of Wine Group, Inc., discusses the early beginnings of the Franzia wine brand with Italian immigrant Giuseppe Franzia and his newly arrived wife, Teresa Carrera, in Ripon, California. It was Teresa’s foresight that would set them on the path to success. “In 1933, while Giuseppe was away in Italy, Prohibition was coming to an end. Teresa saw an opportunity to lessen the dependence of their family on the risks of shipping and selling their perishable grape crop each fall in Eastern and Midwestern markets. She knew that if she could build a winery to make and bottle wine, the family would have all year to sell it and bring in more money. With her vision for a family wine business clearly in mind, Teresa knew just where to go. She traveled by horse and buggy directly to A.P. Giannini’s office in San Francisco and asked for a $10,000 loan, pledging the family farm as collateral.
“With $10,000 in hand, she gave $5,000 to her five sons to start the Franzia Winery, and the other $5,000 she loaned to her son-in-law, Ernest Gallo. His venture became Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery.
“When Giuseppe returned from Italy and learned what his wife had done, he threw a fit. He believed it was too risky and much too perilous for his family to sustain. He was a simple farmer whose goals started and ended with growing grapes. Little did he know that Teresa’s entrepreneurial venture would have such a monumental impact.
“This petite mail order bride from Italy started two of America’s largest wine companies, all while her husband was away in Italy. What began as Franzia Vineyards at the turn of the century turned into a thriving company that has grown and evolved as a result of the hard work of everyone invested in its future.” (Ciocca, Thinking Outside the Box, pp. 4-5)