Why Vision is More Important than Strategy

Michael Hyatt, former CEO and current Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers (largest Christian publishing company in the world) shares why vision is more important than strategy. He shares his story about how as a manager, he took the least profitable division of the company and turned it completely around.

A key excerpt:

> For example, if I had been strategic before I was visionary, I might have said, “Well, I don’t see how we can accomplish much. The situation is so dire. We don’t have many resources to work with. Let’s just try to get to break-even this next year. Maybe we can reduce our working capital some by selling off a little obsolete inventory. And, maybe we can sign a few new authors and get a little revenue growth.”
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> Do you think anyone would have gotten excited about this? Would this vision have attracted the right authors? Would it have retained the right employees? Would it have secured additional corporate resources? I don’t think so.
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> The problem is that people get stuck on the how. They don’t see how they could accomplish more, so they throttle back their vision, convinced that they must be “realistic.” And, what they expect becomes their new reality. This is simply faith applied negatively.