Today, I have a guest post at thoughtLEADERS. Thanks to Mike Figliuolo for featuring me on his outstanding blog. The stories we’ve been reading these past few weeks about Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s new CEO, and the challenges of reversing a 10+ year slide are downright sad – but not entirely surprising. For a long time [...]

Courageous leaders know that companies exist to serve shareholders while also being good corporate citizens. They don’t allow social responsibility projects to get out of control and punish shareholders, but they also don’t allow social responsibility to be ignored.

In business, what is important is getting things done. In pursuing that simply notion, too often we are not clear about the real goal, or even worse, we have several. Lots of things are going on and everyone complains about being busy but in the end, the status quo remains. Strong leaders know how to focus; they make it vividly clear what the goal is and what final achievement of that goal looks like.

It’s the leader’s job to make that happen as fast and as effectively as possibly. They need a different kind of talent and they need to totally reorganize. All those things require real guts. I am sure there is tremendous push-back within the company given their past hardware success and an employee base that knows and prides itself in its big (but shrinking) cell phone business.

Once the leader has nailed down the vision and announced it to the troops, he or she needs to quickly follow with the strategies for how that vision is to be accomplished.

A vision is what the organization wants to be or to have happen in the future. To select a vision, a leader needs to set up a reasonable amount of time to determine the problems and the opportunities via a set of analyses by a carefully selected group of knowledgeable, objective people.

When members of your organization are asking question like this, you are acting like a manager, not a leader. You are not facing reality and finding new ideas and ways to improve. You are probably very comfortable since from your perspective things may be stable and under control.

There are many examples in the marketplace of organizations getting run over because they did nothing but execute the current business. Why didn’t they manager do anything to improve? Because humans are generally wired to seek stability, and once they achieve it, they tend to lose their sense of urgency. In such organizations I will guarantee you that the troops are talking at coffee breaks about the problems and missed opportunities and wondering why nothing is happening.