Vision to have a "VISION"

It is said leading a company is about being a visionary. In fact, top management are supposed to have "vision" on the future of the company. But in reality how many managers actually have vision.

When asked about his company's vision, a senior manager of an insurance company replied that he would be growing at "x" percent and will be selling "y" thousand policies. This sounds so text bookish. Is this supposed to be a vision or an exercise in mathematical extrapolation.

Five years down the line, will customer still be buying policies. Or will they be looking at solutions for risk mitigation, if not risk elimination. Why does one buy an insurance policy? To cover risk. (That was simple!)

Buying a risk cover is not the optimum solution. It is more like hedging. The optimum solution will be to eliminate the risk.

Let us take car insurance as an example. A visit to the BMW museum in Munich, Germany, will introduce one to the concept of intelligent cars. These are connected to a central system which tracks the path of every car on the road and guides it on the appropriate road. It also has a collision prevention module, which kicks in and slams the brake, if it senses the distance with another object too close. Now in this scenario, where the chances of a collision is negated, what would be my incentive to purchase a risk cover for my car?

I would rather invest in the sensor system to prevent collision. If such a system becomes mandatory in all cars, that much the better.

Now back to the insurance company. Will they still be selling insurance policies? If he does not move to providing risk aversion or risk mitigation solutions, this company will probably not be around in 5 years.

A couple of years back, I was consulting a telecom service provider on their CRM initiatives. While discussing with the COO, I was updating him on my discoveries and possible recommendations in the CRM processes at this company. When I finished, he stated that whatever I had to say was acceptable. But his concern was not that he cannot service his customer within the stated SLA. He wanted to know what should he do to be able to survive in future.

With convergence being round the corner, his concern was how should he look at the market and how should he package his products and services. How will the new technologies affect his business model?

Now that is vision. He was on the right path to establishing a vision. Yes, he did have a chart on the revenue figures and the bottom line. But when asked about vision, he admitted that he still needed to have one.

That was one person who had the vision to have a vision.