High Aspirations

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

—Daniel H. Burnham, Chicago architect (1846–1912)

 

High aspirations are the foundation of high performance. This is as true for boards and the companies and organizations they oversee as it is for every area of human performance, team, and individual. High aspirations do not by themselves assure high performance. Execution matters too. Steve Case, founder of AOL, is reportedly fond of quoting Thomas Edison: "Vision without execution is hallucination." But high aspirations are the starting point.

Burnham, the great architect of Chicago's stunning skyline and lakefront park system, had it right. Think about remarkable achievements. Here is an eclectic handful that I have observed in my lifetime:

 

• Landing a man on the moon and returning safely to earth

• Ending legal racial segregation in America and apartheid in South Africa

• Developing Singapore from a tiny, third-world country to an ultra-modern and prosperous city-state in thirty years

• Delivering letters and packages overnight anywhere in the United States

• Bringing together America's best college graduates and neediest kids in urban and rural classrooms

• Winning the Boston Marathon eight times in ten years

• Opening higher education—college and beyond—to people with disabilities

• Creating the iPhone

 

Though different in character, each of these achievements began with an aspiration that it could be, should be, must be done.

On May 25, 1961, in a speech before a special joint session of Congress, President John F. Kennedy set a goal of sending an American safely to the moon before the end of the decade. Eight years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and returned safely to earth.

On August 28, 1963, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial that culminated a decade of hard work and leadership, Martin Luther King Jr. called passionately and memorably for racial equality and an end to segregation. Less than a year later, on July 2, 1964, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. That same year, Nelson Mandela spoke of his hope for "a democratic and free society" while on trial in South Africa for his opposition to Apartheid. The system ended thirty years later with multiracial, democratic elections. Mandela, imprisoned for twenty-seven years under the old regime, was elected president.

Lee Kuan Yew led the development of modern Singapore as prime minister over three decades, from 1965 to 1990. On his watch, Singapore grew from third-world status to one of the most prosperous and modern nations in Asia. While some have criticized Lee as authoritarian and intolerant of dissent, Singapore's development in spite of its tiny landmass and lack of natural resources is a remarkable achievement and reflective of Lee's aspirations for the city-state.

While attending Yale University, Fred Smith reportedly wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in the Information Age. The paper may have received a C grade, but it was the origin of the idea that became FedEx. Today, the company has revenues in excess of $40 billion and employs 300,000 people.

In 1989, Wendy Kopp graduated from Princeton University. She did what thousands of Americans do when difficulty finding a job creates a crossroad in their lives: she became an entrepreneur. Reaching back to a paper she wrote for an undergraduate class, she began the arduous process of creating Teach for America. Since then, more than 38,000 participants have taught more than 3 million children nationwide.

Jean Driscoll is an extraordinary athlete. She was born with spina bifida and grew up in Milwaukee. She was recruited to the University of Illinois to play wheelchair basketball. There, a coach, Marty Morse, spotted her as a high-potential distance athlete. The rest is history: between 1990 and 2000, Jean won the Boston Marathon, Women's Wheelchair Division, eight times in ten years.

Steve Jobs started a new company—NeXT—in the 1980s after being ousted from Apple, the company he founded, in a boardroom coup engineered by John Sculley, the man Jobs recruited from Pepsi to be Apple's CEO. (Jobs famously said, "Look, John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?") At an Educom conference around the same time, Sculley showed an Apple video, The Knowledge Navigator (watch it on YouTube). Almost twenty years later, with Jobs at the helm, Apple launched a revolutionary product: the iPhone. It was a product that no customer requested and no competitor imagined. It converted the fanciful product portrayed in The Knowledge Navigator into reality and supercharged the smartphone industry.

Shortly after leaving Cummins in 1987, I consulted with NeXT and had the unforgettable experience of being up close and personal with Steve Jobs. His biography by Walter Isaacson captures Jobs perfectly. When it came to people-pleasing technology and amazing aesthetics, Steve embodied high aspirations.

I first heard the importance of high aspirations for organizations articulated by a wonderful leader, Bob Galvin, chairman of Motorola Corporation from 1959 to 1986. Bob said that the least leaders can do for their organizations is to articulate high performance aspirations. With them, he said, there's a shot at greatness. Without them, there's no chance. And leadership begins with the board.

Imagine if every board of every company and nonprofit organization in America explicitly agreed: our aim is to provide great governance to the company or organization in our charge. Imagine if they all understood what that commitment meant and then fulfilled it. The entire distribution of governance performance in America would shift higher. It would be a wonderful thing for companies, nonprofits, and the nation that would set an example for the world.