Visionary & Pragmatic

Recently during a business discussion, an associate of ours remarked pointedly that I was being pragmatic. In truth, there are equal numbers of people that labeled me as visionary as there are pragmatic. As I mentioned that it is possible to be both pragmatic and visionary; some rolled their eyes.

In a sense, many a great leaders in successful Fortune 500 companies are, like what I described, both visionary and pragmatic. In fact, there is one particular leader who is not only visionary and pragmatic, but also a fierce critic at the same time, well, almost.

Just to see if you can name him. He created a cartoon character and named him, Mortimer. It was said that he wanted to re-create a miniature live stream railroad which he named, Carolwood Pacific Railroad. He was reportedly turned down by more than 100 financiers to fund his dream project. He also once said that "dreams offer too little as collateral". At the same, if not for his dream, the world would never know the "happiest place on earth". And his middle name is Elias.

Got it? Yes, he is none other than Walt Disney. Of course Mortimer was renamed Mickey. And the "happiest place on earth" is Disneyland. It was the television studios that funded his dream and some said that the railroad never existed in his childhood home town!

If you study about Walt Disney, you will find that many years later, Robert Dilts, one of the pioneers of NLP, would develop a model of the strategy used by Disney. And this model used the three viewpoints or perspectives employed by Disney. Essentially, Disney had a wonderful imagination. He was a dreamer (visionary) to begin with. Think Disneyland. Then he would ask himself, how can I manifest those dreams in the real world? By now taking on the role of a realist (pragmatic), he would then examine the plan to manifest the dream by looking at the resources, money, time, information needed to make this plan a reality. After that, he would adopt a critical stance and question if people will buy into his dream, is it exciting enough, is it compelling, or would people even bother?

Therefore, while most people usually take one stance or at most two, Disney played all three roles at different times to ensure that any project would be clearly thought through before it was being launched. So much so that some of the close associates of Disney said that sometimes they really didn't know which Walt is coming to work today. Hence, Disney's model of creativity has clearly demonstrated that it is possible to not only be visionary and pragmatic but also being critical too, all that in one person. So next, we will talk about how with each perspective or viewpoint, we can, being the same person, develop different thoughts that create different results.