Visionary™

The Visionary sits at the top of the Accountability Chart™ with the Integrator™ directly below, and the two hold a same page meeting to stay aligned. EOS asks the Visionary to take Rocks like anybody else, which is the usual sticking point, and to bring new ideas to the Issues List before announcing them to the whole company on a Friday.

The pattern this names is common enough to deserve a word. A founder with ten ideas a week is genuinely valuable and genuinely destabilizing, and companies usually cope by learning to ignore most of what they say. Giving the role a definition and a channel keeps the ideas and removes the whiplash from everybody underneath.

Worked example: The founder of a forty-person agency used to announce new services in the Monday all-hands. Staff had learned to wait a fortnight before acting on anything he said. Under the new arrangement he brought three ideas to a monthly session with the general manager. One became a Rock and the other two were dropped in ten minutes.

Sources: Rocket Fuel®, Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters; Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on People