Passion, Vision, Purpose

I drove to the coast on Saturday and began listening to the EMyth Mastery audiobook by Michael Gerber. I'm only a few chapters into it but so far it's proving to be a very different book than The Emyth Revisited, which I first read several years ago and have recommended to many people. Mastery dives deeper, at least so far, into what it means to be an entrepreneur. Though he focuses on business creation and building, "entrepreneur" can easily mean anyone who wants to change the world in some way. 

The notions he's explored so far are passion, vision, and purpose. It's not clear what proceeds what, but it seems likely that the seed of a vision generates passion as it develops.  At a certain point, this passion becomes actionable and creates a purpose, an objective.  From there on out all of the other elements that create change in the world around us can come into play, in particular, strategies and systems.  

This is a different structure from the one that I got to know during my corporate life.  That was mission, vision, strategy.  In truth, there was disagreement on the sequencing here as well.  Does mission precede vision or the other way around?  If you're working for someone else mission comes first since your mission is typically a component of their vision.  Then, in the course of fractal decomposition, a vision for accomplishing that mission is created which can then be acted on.  This is a useful structure for creating cohesion in a large organization filled with highly empowered people.  

Working with highly empowered people has its risks.  They often want to put their vision before their mission, which eventually results in chaos in the organization. It's a good example of very capable people in the wrong job.  They likely should be entrepreneurs.

An entrepreneur has their own vision that's not necessarily beholden to anyone else. In a sense, it's created from whole cloth from the experiences and forces on an entrepreneur.  This vision is nurtured and developed to a point where it can begin to have an impact.  In a very real sense, the vision is the conception of an enterprise in a very analogical sense with the conception and development of a child. Both begin, ideally, with passion and develop from there to eventually change the world.

The analogy is interesting.  It opens a way to explore the pros and cons of vision promiscuity.  Perhaps in another post.