1: Mastercard’s former CEO Ajay Banga was walking through the office one day when he noticed a slogan written in a staircase:
“Mastercard, the heart of commerce.”
“It made me think,” he reflects in Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vik Malhotra‘s powerful book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
A thought struck him: “Commerce is mostly in cash, right?
“I realized that in the company nobody talked about cash. If anything, they talked about Visa and Amex and China UnionPay and local schemes.
“That led me to figure out the percentage of transactions in the world that were done with cash,” he continues.
The answer? More than 85% of consumer transactions were done with cash.
“From then on I talked about our vision as being to ‘kill cash.’ Instead of fighting for a piece of the fifteen percent of transactions that were electronic, we fought for a piece of the eighty-five that weren’t (yet).”
Which is how Mastercard’s game-changing vision came to be.
Ajay’s insight that day exemplifies what the world’s best CEOs do. They don’t “just raise aspiration levels,” the authors note; “they change the definition of success.”
2: McKinsey & Company consultants Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram have conducted an in-depth study of the world’s most successful CEOs. Their research has identified six mindsets that these CEOs possess.
Mindset #1? Be Bold.
Rather than “try to minimize uncertainty and guard against making mistakes,” the authors note, the best CEOs “approach setting the direction of their company with a different mindset.
“They embrace uncertainty,” they write, “with a view that fortune favors the bold. They’re less a ‘taker’ of their fate and more a ‘shaper’—constantly looking for and acting on opportunities that bend the curve of history.”
These leaders realize that only 10 percent of companies create 90 percent of the total economic profit. They embrace the reality that “the top quintile performers deliver thirty times more economic profit than the companies in the next three quintiles combined.”
3: When Netflix started, its business was delivering DVDs by mail.
But back in 2002, Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings was already thinking ahead. In an interview with Wired.com that year, he shared his vision for the company: “The dream twenty years from now,” he said, “is to have a global entertainment distribution company that provides a unique channel for film producers and studios.”
He added while speaking to the CEO Excellence authors: “That’s why we called the company Netflix and not DVD BY MAIL.”
The key takeaway for us? Reed was thinking big from the outset.
“The big strategic moves that followed made sense in ways they would never have otherwise,” the authors note, “moving into video streaming, betting on the cloud, creating Netflix Originals, driving exponential globalization, and so on.”
More tomorrow when we will explore how the best CEOs get their vision right.
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Reflection: How bold am I in setting the vision for my organization, my team, or my life?
Action: Journal about what a bigger, bolder vision would look like.
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