Those of you who might have read my previous post, will be familiar with my frustrations with the matrix organization and how the problem boils down to a lack of leadership . At the end of my post I came to this conclusion: “What comes to me from this discussion is the need to better define the difference between leadership, management, talent, and vision.” I think the challenge many organizations face is an assumption that leadership, talent, management and vision can all exist in the CEO. I’ve come to believe that is not true and apparently someone else agrees with my point of view. Umair Haque recently posted an article on the Harvard business blog on the subject of Redefining the CEO Agenda for the 21st Century . Umair’s post focuses in on Google and how they’ve successfully outmaneuvered Microsoft by securing an ad outsourcing deal with Yahoo!. Umair boils the post down with a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt :

“Or consider what Eric Schmidt said today: that Google has a “moral imperative” to help publishers benefit from advertising. That’s a living example of one of the principles we’ve discussed – good beats evil – being used to make real-world strategic decisions.”

The concept of a CEO using the word moral imperative is something relatively unheard of and yet it’s what sets them apart from the competition. Umair continues the thought in his post:

“And that’s how Google ends up in a league of it’s own. Schmidt’s quote is important because it’s a vivid demonstration of Google having the courage to question business as usual – in fact, this time, Schimdt is challenging perhaps the foundational orthodoxy of industrial-era business.”

I think Umair is right on point with what sets Google apart from the competition and it ties back to my previous post about the concept of differentiating the various traits we assume a leader has: vision, leadership, talent, and management. Rather than dredge these out over the course of a single blog post let me focus in on the key point I feel Eric Schmidt embodies – Vision .

Vision is something that great companies have. When you get employees from one of those company together in a room and ask about the company vision you should get the same answer from everyone. The challenge many organizations face is that most people expect the vision to come from the CEO. Perhaps the CEO is the person that articulates it best but often times a CEO is disconnected from the market, customers and day-to -day operations; essentially no where near to the right place to formulate the correct vision.

Occasionally you hear the term visionary CEO associated with innovative or entrepreneurial companies (such as Google). But what about the rest where you don’t see that moniker used? Does that mean they have no vision? Many will claim that they have a vision however you’ll find they have either a) difficulty getting consensus on what it is or b) a slick marketing driven statement. What these companies really need is to acknowledge that their CEO is not visionary or nor sufficiently engaged in the business to drive that vision.

Let’s be real, there are a lot of demands on the CEO’s time and managing the company vision might not always take priority. In these scenarios the CEO needs to outsource the responsibility for the company vision to someone who is publicly acknowledged as the visionary. By not doing so the CEO does a disservice to themselves and one of two things happens, they either encourage rouge operations based on the random visions of employees, or worse end up with many interpretations of what they should be doing. Sometimes companies pass on the vision to the fluffily titled ‘Evangelist’ sometimes it’s the CTO , or the head of product; I’d argue that this is really a half measure and potentially detrimental. How many VP’s do you know that have slashes in their titles? VP Marketing/HR/Investor Relations, VP Finance/Legal, VP Product/Engineering… doesn’t make sense does it? When it comes to Vision, that all important corporate compass, it needs to be an all-consuming passion for the individual knighted with the responsibility for guiding the organization.

Perhaps if more companies had leaders declaring their “moral imperatives”, we’d find ourselves in a refreshingly competitive enviroment where employees have no question as to what defines corporate success. One can only dream.

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