Importance of Creating a Shared Vision

Listen to David as he explains the importance of establishing a common vision by sharing a story from his family business. Creating a shared vision from the start, can help ensure the well-being of a company in the future as it undergoes change. In a family business specifically, building a shared vision can also help protect the relationship of family members as they move toward the next generation.

Often families don’t have a shared vision, they’re so busy building the business, so busy working day to day in the company, they don’t think about the long term vision. If I think about our own family examples, my dad and my uncle worked together for 40 years, they worked wonderfully well together. My dad was the outside guy, he was the salesman, the chief rainmaker for the company. My uncle was the inside guy, he was into professional management and strategic planning and so they were a wonderful compliment. Together they built a company that was one of the leading real estate and construction companies in Canada. In my dad’s later years, the company was voted one of the 100 best companies to work for in Canada. I mean, they had this wonderful success. But they had no shared vision as to what they were doing this for. Where were they taking this rocket ship they’d built? And so as, tragically, looking back on it, my dad and my uncle were building an enterprise and they each had a completely different vision as to where they were taking it. My dad’s vision was that the family business would be passed down to our generation to own and manage. A legitimate vision I think. My uncle’s vision, equally legitimate, was that he wanted to take the company public and give all the money to charity. You can see they were on a collision course, they had radically different ideas of why they were doing what they were doing. And so at the end of the day it became a contest of wills and, tragically my dad and my uncle after working together for 40 years lost their relationship and the family business was ultimately sold and my dad and my uncle’s relationships were destroyed.