Let me tell you something. I came here to win a trophy. And on the face of it Ted Ray or I should carry it off. Not for you, not for England, but for sheer bloody pride at being the best, that's why we do this. And if Mr. Ouimet wins tomorrow, it's because he's the best, because of who he is. Not who his father was, not how much money he's got, because of who he bloody is! And I'll thank you to remember that. And I'll thank you to show the respect a gentleman gives as a matter of course.
- The Greatest Game Ever Played
My friend Sheila Brady was regaling us one night over dinner at her Woodside, California, home. The rain was coming down in sheets and wind was whipping through the eucalypts and the wine was flowing freely: a perfect time for let-your-hair-down storytelling. Many of the stories were of Sheila's days at Apple, where she was a star project manager. But then the tales turned to Silicon Valley start-ups of more recent vintage, and she opened the floor to the subject of vision. Others around the table (they were employees of half a dozen Valley start-ups) leaped in. They began to talk about vision, mostly observed by its absence.
The most common sign of absent vision was the sense of not knowing "who we are." One particularly depressing example was a top-level meeting at a new Valley dot-com where the company's only apparent reason for existing was to make millionaires out of everybody in the meeting as quickly as possible so they could all retire. Nobody really wanted to be there two years later. Talk at the meeting moved naturally to the success of E-Bay, that month's most astonishing stock market highflier. "Hey, why don't we have some sort of auction component for our company?" one of the engineers proposed. And so they discussed for hours how to work an on-line auction into a company that had nothing to auction and no particular auction skills or capabilities.
"What was missing from that meeting," Sheila observed, "was someone who was willing to say, 'Auction might be nice, but it just isn't us.'"
It's nontrivial for a company and everyone in it to know "who we are." A little bit easier, however, is to know "who we aren't." When even that knowledge is missing - when there is no basis in the company to say about a given cockamamy scheme "it just isn't us" - the company clearly lacks vision.
Vision implies a visionary. There has to be one person who knows in his or her bones what's "us" and what isn't. And it can't be faked. Employees can smell an absence of vision the way a dog can smell fear.
- Tom DeMarco, Slack
