Equip for Change
Yesterday when OpenAI introduced their revolutionary GPT-4o ‘omnimodel’ to the world – now with audio, vision and text reasoning – did you notice how CTO Mira Murati structured her presentation?
It’s all too easy to focus on the technology shifts, missing new leadership learnings all around us.
Mira very deliberately grounded her presentation in OpenAI’s mission: To ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
What mission are you on?
As Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos once shared, “I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.”
In a world of fast-moving change – when so many things seem uncertain and changeable – the eternal concepts of vision, purpose and mission provide teams and organisations with much-needed stability. Clarifying where you are heading and why it matters, as the way of getting there shifts and evolves.
Too often the strategic concepts of vision, mission and purpose get mixed up. It’s surprisingly common for major organisations to state their vision when in fact it is their mission, and vice versa. No wonder it’s confusing when concepts such as mission and purpose are very similar yet still different.
Your vision is the future state you are aiming towards. Visions can be ‘seen’ so they describe the external state that will result when your mission is successfully achieved, in line with your purpose.
Mission is a concept that links vision and purpose. Vision is where you are heading. Purpose is why you exist. Mission is what you are driven to do.
To get from here to there.
Inspiring your team forward.
On purpose.
PS In case you’re wondering what mission inspired me to send you this… just three meaningful words: Equip for Change
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