ONE Dream®: The Transformative Journey
The role of the leader is to inspire by identifying, realizing, and sustaining a dream.
Over the last 50 years of business theorizing and academic and professional development, we have succeeded in expanding our capacity to quantify, measure, and analyze, but we have stifled our capacity to dream. It has become conventional thinking that dreaming is too “out there” for a business environment. As a result, we shy away from talking about dreams in organizations. Instead, we have created “mission, vision, and values” statements. But the currency of mission, vision, and values statements has been devalued, their indiscriminate use and homogeneity rendering them feeble, uninspiring, and indistinguishable from everyone else’s. Great organizations have a dream—it is the heartbeat of their greatness. And when that heartbeat falters, this is how they get it back:
What Dr. Secretan describes is passion and how organizations can ignite a similar and necessary spark of excitement and energy in their colleagues and customers that will fuel the accomplishment of something extraordinary—such as a dream. Not a five-percent increase in market share or a ten-percent return on equity—but a bold, daring, impudent, audacious, outrageous, thrilling, exhilarating, and inspiring dream. He has successfully developed, honed and implemented a revolutionary system for identifying, realizing and sustaining a dream, based on rigorous research and cutting-edge science allied with ambitious visioning, which provides the platform for a new strategic direction.
In many organizations internal competition for resources, ideology, and the need for control or power hamper the development of a unified vision. The creation of what Dr. Secretan calls ONE Dream® raises the aspirations of all the parties—inspiring them as ONE—because a dream elevates the conversation to Higher Ground, above the mundane and the pedestrian, to where the inspiration of shared ideals hold sway, leaving the squabbles over territory, power, and position to the lower ground. This is how corporations, cities, states and countries create a vision that is greater than the day-to-day differences of the constituent parties. The Louisville, Kentucky Region is an example:
When leaders are invited to describe their richly imagined ONE Dream® for their organization, remarkable things happen: they focus on aspirations that are not the usual corporate vanilla statements, and they describe their most extraordinary, outrageous, never-before-achieved hopes, often secretly held until then, because they now have permission to be fearless and imaginative, to think outside the box, and to be truly outrageous and unusually creative. Leaders come up with some remarkable ideas—hospitals who dream of eliminating all avoidable deaths, banks who dream of changing the world, corporations who dream of becoming environmentally friendly, regional communities who dream of becoming world-class centers of excellence and innovation, organizations who dream of a richly imagined future—and these are all from direct client experiences of The Secretan Center Inc.