Strategic Management: Vision (Just the Quotes)

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." (Jonathan Swift, "Thoughts on Various Subjects", 1703)

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." (Arthur Schopenhauer, "Parerga and Paralipomena", 1851)

"Management techniques are obviously essential, but what matters is leadership. [...] Leading the whole organization needs wisdom and flair and vision and they are another matter; they cannot be reduced to a system and incorporated into a training manual." (Anthony Jay, "Management and Machiavelli", 1967)

"The engineering is secondary to the vision." (Cynthia Ozick, "The Hole/Birth Catalog", 1972)

"Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." (Peter Drucker, "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Challenges", 1973)

"The source of good management is found in the imagination of leaders, persons who form new visions and manifest them with a high degree of craft. The blending of vision and craft communicates the purpose. In the arts, people who do that well are masters. In business, they are leaders." (Henry M. Boettinger, Harvard Business Review on Human Relations, 1986)

"Management skills are only part of what it takes. [...] Managers must also be corporate warriors or leaders. These unique individuals are the problem identifiers. They possess a strong sense of vision; view firefighting as an opportunity to do things differently and smarter; and are business strategists who help identify key corporate growth issues." (John W Aldridge, Management Review, December 1987)

"Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)

"Many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that galvanize an organization. What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)

"Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)

"[…] the most successful strategies are visions, not plans. Strategic planning isn’t strategic thinking. One is analysis, and the other is synthesis." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, 1994) 

"Sometimes strategies must be left as broad visions, not precisely articulated, to adapt to a changing environment." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, 1994)

"Enterprise Engineering is not a single methodology, but a sophisticated synthesis of the most important and successful of today's change methods. 'Enterprise Engineering' first explains in detail all the critical disciplines (including continuous improvement, radical reinvention of business processes, enterprise redesign, and strategic visioning). It then illustrates how to custom-design the right combination of these change methods for your organization's specific needs." (James Martin, "The Great Transition, 1995)

"Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving. Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles." (John P Kotter, "Leading Change", 1996) 

"To attain quality, it is well to begin by establishing the 'vision' for the organization, along with policies and goals. Conversion of goals into results (making quality happen) is then done through managerial processes - sequences of activities that produce the intended results." (Joseph M Juran, "How to think about quality", 1999)

"Enterprise architecture is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise's future state and enable its evolution. The scope of the enterprise architecture includes the people, processes, information and technology of the enterprise, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment. Enterprise architects compose holistic solutions that address the business challenges of the enterprise and support the governance needed to implement them." (Anne Lapkin et al, "Gartner Clarifies the Definition of the Term 'Enterprise Architecture", 2008)

"Strategy is the serious work of figuring out how to translate vision and mission into action. Strategy is a general plan of action that describes resource allocation and other activities for dealing with the environment and helping the organization reach its goals. Like vision, strategy changes, but successful companies develop strategies that focus on core competence, develop synergy, and create value for customers. Strategy is implemented through the systems and structures that are the basic architecture for how things get done in the organization." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

"Vision is a capacity to understand a position and to generate solid strategic plans." (Diego Rasskin-Gutman, "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind", 2009)

"Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, 'vision', planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011)

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012) 

"Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers." (Henry Mintzberg)