Mission and vision are not the same thing.

A mission is what you do. Every organization needs to know this. Think mission in the military sense. “Your mission is to defend this position.” Here’s Wal-Mart’s: “To help people save money so they can live better.”

A vision is different. It’s about who you want to become and where you want to be at a time in the future. Wal-Mart’s vision at one time was “To be the worldwide leader in retailing.” Notice the difference between mission and vision.

Clarifying and communicating both mission and vision are key tasks for leaders.

If you know your mission but your vision is unclear, try these questions. I asked them yesterday at a church leadership meeting and I think they helped bring our vision into focus.

1. What is our mission in a nutshell?
2. What kind of organization must we be to be great at that mission?
3. If we become that kind of organization and do a great job on our mission, where could we be in 5 (or 25) years?

If you’re like me and you worry about making a decision you’ll regret, let me stress you out even more. Doing nothing is dangerous too. Any sense you have that passivity reduces the risks and dangers of life is an illusion. In fact the opposite is true. Taking action is the most fundamental key to overcoming problems and reaching your goals that I know.

One reason we are attracted to passivity is to avoid blame and guilt. If we do nothing, and the worst happens, we can throw up our hands and say “I didn’t do it”. If we initiate a big change and the worst happens, someone points a finger and says “It’s your fault”, and we feel terrible.

Life is risky and dangerous and you can’t change that. Bad things are gonna happen and some of them will be your fault. Don’t aspire to die having made as few mistakes as possible. Don’t be reckless, stay off the limb, but be brave. Focus on getting the best outcome, not on getting the least blame. Hang around friends who will congratulate you for trying and failing, not those who will condemn you. Be proactive. Doing nothing is risky too.

A group of my peers at Dr. John Townsend’s Leadership Coaching Program reminded me recently that I am made to be an entrepreneur. I am good at starting things. I am not that good at management, running things, or being a corporate guy. With that in mind, I have been spending more time on starting things this month. It is exciting, and productive, and confirms what I am cut out to do.

The strengths movement led by Marcus Buckingham and the Gallup organization is based on this simple yet powerful idea, that putting one’s strengths to work is more productive than working to improve one’s weaknesses. So managers in the workplace, for example, should place employees in roles that capitalize on the employees’ existing strengths. If a waiter lacks the strengths needed to be a good waiter, don’t try to re-train him, move him to a different role or move him out of the company.

If you want to know more about that, read “First Break All the Rules”, by Buckingham. It’s a great, research-based book about management and strengths.

I think the strengths movement is right. But I do think there are times when it is worthwhile to work on improving a weakness. I propose these guidelines:

1. Never work on improving a weakness with intent to specialize in it.

Choose career roles that capitalize on your strengths. Don’t work on a weakness for the sake of making it your specialty. If you are already in a specialty that requires a strength where you have a weakness, start pursuing a new specialty.

2. Invest far more in changing yourself than in changing other people.

For two reasons:

a) It takes a lot of self-motivation to bring about change. If the person you want to change is not motivated, it’s not gonna happen. If the person you want to change is you, you are already motivated, by definition.

b) It’s really expensive to bring about change. It may be worth the investment to change yourself, because you are stuck with yourself and you have the rest of your life to receive a return. If you change yourself, you own the changes.

It’s probably not worth the investment to change an employee, because you can replace them with someone who already has the required strengths, and you only get a fraction of the rest of their life to receive a return. (At best, they will give you 40-50 hours a week until retirement.) If you invest in changing someone else, they own the changes.

3. Invest in improving your weaknesses when they are so general they affect everything.

The more general the ability, the more important it is to have an acceptable competency in that area. A weakness in a very general ability is a handicap in any specialty. But that doesn’t mean try to make it a strength. Some examples:

a) Being unable to read would severely hinder my specialty as an entrepreneur. If my poor reading skills are a handicap, it’s probably worth improving to an acceptable competency because it’s such a general ability. I should not, however, try to become the world’s fastest reader, nor should I choose a specialty that depends on superior reading skills.

b) Being insensitive to the feelings of other people would severely hinder any specialty that involves human interaction. Even though it would be costly, it’s probably worth improving my own empathy to an acceptable competency because it’s such a general ability. I should not, however, try to become a world-class empathizer or choose a career as a psychotherapist. It’s not gonna happen.

c) Being unable to throw a football in anything resembling a smooth spiral does not hinder my specialty as an entrepreneur, because throwing a spiral is not a general ability, it is a very specific one. It is probably not worth investing time and energy to improve my quarterback skills.

The most general abilities are a healthy body, a healthy mind, the things we learn in elementary school, and the things we call character. Some examples: reading, writing, arithmetic, ethics, conversation, empathy, confrontation, problem solving, and physical fitness.

A hail mary pass is not usually a sound strategy for winning a football game. Likewise, going out on a limb and taking a big risk is not usually a sound strategy for growing a business or turning it around.

Silver bullets, quick fixes, and big dramatic moves are tempting because they offer an alternative to the steady, disciplined process of moving down the field. And when the receiver catches the long bomb, it is awfully exciting.

In business, hail mary passes can be big mergers and acquisitions, big investments in unrelated new product lines, replacing the CEO with an outsider, or million dollar superbowl ads.

There’s a huge inertia to a business. Jim Collins compares it to a flywheel, a big heavy wheel that takes a long time to push up to speed, and keeps spinning for a long time after you stop pushing on it. I think he’s right. You don’t spin a flywheel up to speed in one momentary burst. It’s the steady, disciplined, daily push that builds a business (or a life) up to success. And that’s why the silver bullets, the quick fixes, and the big dramatic moves don’t work.

Three caveats:

1) Steady and disciplined does not mean avoid change. Change is usually necessary. Make your changes by trying lots of things in the smallest, quickest, least risky way that will let you know if they are working or not. Don’t go out on a limb with a big, untested change.

2) There is such a thing as a real emergency, when steady, disciplined action will not get the job done. Sometimes paramedics have to take quick, drastic action to save someone who is in immediate danger. If your business is in immediate danger (doesn’t have enough cash to make payroll, for example) there may be no steady, disciplined solution available. So get out the defibrillator when you have to. Still, grabbing the paddles and shocking someone’s heart is an informed, tested action, not the same thing as a desperate grab for a silver bullet.

3) There’s also such a thing as a dead end. Don’t do a steady, disciplined march to extinction. To know if you are facing a dead end, don’t look at how difficult things are now, that is not a reliable guide. (There are easy paths to extinction and there are hard paths to success, and vice versa.) Look at the real, honest, long-term prospects of your situation. If there isn’t sufficient value down the line to justify the steady, disciplined work it will take to get there, end it and start something else.

Whether you are involved in a business (or project or relationship) that’s doing well and you want to take it to the next level, or you are feeling some desperation as the flywheel is slowing down, don’t be tempted toward the hail mary pass. Don’t strap dynamite to the flywheel and light the fuse. If you are not facing a bona-fide emergency, and you are not heading into a dead end, then take a deep breath, realize it’s going to take some time, and do the steady, disciplined, daily things that move the ball down the field. Often this means look at what’s working, and do more of that.

I’m trying to think of a lesson to be learned from this, but so far I got nothing. I guess mistakes happen in spite of our best attempts to avoid them.

At ATS Rentals, we rent audio/visual equipment via UPS. We ship equipment like projectors and camcorders to our customers, they use them, and ship them back via UPS. Sometime last year we decided it would be nice to include a single-serving roll of box tape with each box. We thought, if the customer doesn’t have any tape handy, they can use the tape to close the box for return shipping.

This probably should have occurred to us sooner, because we did get a lot of boxes back with odd types of tape on them. We got everything from blue painter’s masking tape to pink duct tape. Apparently regular tape was not around when our customers needed it.

Also, we re-use our shipping boxes to save money and trees (unless the customer opts otherwise when placing the order). All the weird tape was ruining boxes. So by including the single serving of nice, clear, regular box tape, we hoped to be able to reuse more boxes as well as increase customer convenience.

Unfortunately, most of our nice little rolls of tape came back unused, sometimes inside boxes closed with pink duct tape. Apparently our customers didn’t know what those little mini rolls were for. So we came up with little labels that said “Box Tape – For Return Shipping” and stuck them on the tape. That worked pretty well.

Around the same time we noticed another problem. Customers were throwing away the rechargeable batteries we ship with our video lights. They looked too much like regular AA batteries and when they were dead, people were simply tossing them. So we came up with a little label that said “Rechargeable – Do Not Discard” and put it on the packs of batteries. This worked well, and we no longer had to buy so many replacement rechargeable batteries.

So we were feeling pretty good about our little innovations, until a couple of weeks ago when something in labeling land went wrong. All our little rolls of box tape went out labeled “Rechargeable – Do Not Discard“. And sure enough, this week, boxes are coming back with all varieties of duct and masking tape on the outside, and nice, little, unused, “rechargeable” rolls of box tape inside. Yeah, kind of embarrassing.

I want to know how the customers who didn’t use the tape thought through this:

Hmm. Rechargeable tape. That’s different. It’s amazing what they come up with these days. I wonder how you recharge it? Do not discard… Must be expensive. Better not use it.

“Honeeeey, do you still have that roll of pink duct tape around here?”