An Aspiration for the Future
This is an excerpt from chapter 1 of my book THE NATURAL STRATEGIST: Cultivating a Mindset of Care and Connection.
A vision becomes an aspiration for the future. It describes what the world could be if we accomplished everything we set out to do. It becomes a destination for us and our team. It inspires us to think bigger and longer term. It opens our minds to what we and our business could be one day if we embrace our vision to its fullest and deliver on its promise.
Stewart Butterfield, the founder and CEO of Slack, a cloud-based collaboration platform, shared a far-reaching memo with this team just before Slack’s preview release in the summer of 2013. He detailed his vision and how to go about it. When Slack officially launched six months later, “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” was published as an article on Medium (Butterfield 2014).
His ambition was to build something people wanted and to make people’s work lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. All his thinking and direction centered around that vision, and he described the vision for his company not as selling software but as selling organizational transformation.
Instead of talking about features and how and where to use the software, he painted a picture of the potential to reduce information overload, reduce email, and reduce stress in the workplace. He talked about how people who used Slack’s product would be able to make better decisions faster and how that could lead to better teams and better organizations.
He emphasized the importance of work his teams were doing and how their work and the functionality they were creating were in service of delivering these outcomes for their customers. With his clear vision in place, Slack went on to become one of the fastest growing business applications in history, and within a few years the company was acquired by Salesforce, Inc. in 2021 for twenty-seven billion dollars.
“Make work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive” still greets visitors to Slack’s website in large black letters at the center of its “About Us” page (Slack 2023). Ten years and more than 200,000 customers later, the vision Butterfield had laid out and that guided his employees at the time still guides the company today as a promise to its customers in more than 150 countries and as a rallying cry for its employees.
While Butterfield’s clear vision rallied his team to take all the steps necessary to build a future product that would simplify and improve working life, Florent Menegaux’s vision for Michelin is focused on sustainability.
Menegaux, Michelin’s CEO, believes: “Tomorrow, everything at Michelin will be sustainable” (2020). Michelin is committed to producing tires made entirely from sustainable materials by 2050. While this goal may seem ambitious, Michelin has already taken many steps to make progress toward this vision.
Today, about 30 percent of the materials used in its tires come from sustainable resources. Their innovative approach to sustainable tire production, which involves using green waste and recycled materials to make new tires, is featured on their website. In a cooking show-style video, a playful nod to their travel and restaurant guide business, a chef demonstrates how to prepare and cook sustainable tires.
He chops and processes green waste with biomass from wood, rice husks, leaves, and corn stalks. The butadiene produced by that bio-sourced process will be used as a future ingredient and replace the current petroleum-based version.
Next, in an elaborate process, the chef mixes the butadiene with recycled styrene from plastics in food packaging, such as yogurt cups or food trays, to create synthetic rubber, another ingredient for his project. This new synthetic rubber will eventually be mixed with recycled plastic bottles and old rubber tires to make a new tire.
“A recipe that is not as easy as it looks,” their video aptly suggests (Johnson 2021). And while the actual process is certainly not as simple as the chef makes it seem, it highlights the creativity, the engineering, and the many actions and initiatives that Michelin’s vision has unlocked on its path to a fully sustainable future: to create and assemble a tire that is 100 percent made by transforming green waste and recycled materials.
In its pursuit of its vision to be a leader in sustainable mobility, Michelin builds on the strengths of its own research and development capabilities and forms a series of collaborations with companies at the forefront of new technologies.
A clear vision can inspire teams and drive companies toward achieving their goals.
This is an excerpt of chapter 1 of The Natural Strategist: Cultivating a Mindset of Care and Connection.
If you enjoyed reading this short excerpt, you can get my book at your favorite bookstore.