Book Excerpts: How to compete and win like the world’s most innovative leaders

Whatever your view of Elon Musk, one thing he did when he helped launch Tesla was articulate a loft y vision for the company.“Our goal

Elon understands people. He understands that a lofty vision, an inspirational vision, attracts world-class people,particularly world-class engineers. With those world-class engineers, he’s able to build a better product. That better product attracts customers and attracts investors, and it’s self-reinforcing. As this feeds on itself, engineers are increasingly inspired to join, not only because of the lofty vision but also because of the increasingly strong brand behind it. These conditions attract increasingly strong talent; it feels good to work there and to be viewed as someone who is helping drive innovation toward that lofty goal.

Without prompting, Anderson independently has described the same virtuous cycle that we have seen many leaders utilise with positive results. This cycle includes the following steps:

Identify an exciting, lofty, even inspirational vision. The vision needs to solve an important problem, pursue a big opportunity, or just be exciting.