by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

“Success is not a destination,” Hallgrimsson said…”It’s a continuous journey…”NYTimes Sports article, June 2018.

 Heimer Hallgrimsson is the national soccer coach for Iceland. Iceland reached the World Cup stage for the first time in Russia in June 2018. A minnow nation with 350,000 people joined the giants of the soccer world and incredibly tied their first game against Argentina, the runner-up finalist in the previous 2014 World Cup. As well as its soccer pedigree, Argentina has a population 114 times larger than Iceland at 40 million.

Who would think that Hallgrimsson is not even a full-time coach? His full-time job is as a practicing dentist at home in Iceland. When he took over coaching the team about 5 years ago, there was virtually no interest in Iceland appearing in the international arena. One of his first activities was to start dragging potential spectators to games because he knew that strong local support was paramount, if he wished to build pride within his team members. Ten at a time he would get local people to assemble at the sidelines.

Gradually as his team started chalking-up winning ways, the idea of really supporting their team caught fire among the population; especially when they knocked England out of the European Cup competition in 2016. They just took the scalp of another supposed soccer powerhouse. When they returned home with a respectable performance, being knocked out in the quarterfinals by France; supporters lined the road from Keflavik airport to the city center and showed their appreciation with the Viking thunderclap.  We’ve seen that thunderclap both in Russian stadiums, as well as televised gatherings of large groups of supporters back home in Reykjavik.

Hallgrimsson wasn’t interested in a typical step-by-step, quarter-by-quarter approach to developing his team. He was more interested in Iceland joining the elite of soccer and the longer journey it would take to get there. He was more interested in putting the right fundamentals in place and then orchestrating events on a continuous, challenging journey to take his team as far as he could – the best players, game strategy, resource support, coaches, training facilities, and, above all, getting Iceland’s people to support the team. He then set about orchestrating his team’s pathway to the World Cup and beyond.

Even if Iceland didn’t quite make it through the first round of competition in 2018: as long as Hallgrimsson remains healthy, he will be intending for his team to be back in the Middle East “hothouse” of Qatar in 2022 for his team to make its mark again.

Similarly, if you look at some of the business powerhouses today, 10-15 years ago they were still relative minnows – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Starbucks. Their principle executives – or strategists-pathfinders – were dreaming about their market message, the resources, the people, their strategy, their marketplace competitors, and so forth to make their dream come true.  They have been more interested in a longer term journey than reaching near term destinations.

Once you become fixated on reaching a near-term destination, you are likely to focus all your energy and resources toward doing that rather than building the pathway and organization for accomplishing something 10, 20 or 30 times greater than that – created by visions of a much longer but realistic journey. Those near-term destinations just become milestones toward a much bigger trip, rather than the be-all-and-end-all during the current year.

How many times have you reached a particular near-term destination in your life and everything seemed to fall a little flat? Then you have to pick yourself up and focus on what’s immediately at hand, or start thinking about your next destination…and then building up the motivation once more to pursue the next easily recognizable goal. Whereas, if you were on a continuous journey, today’s milestone would just be a way-station toward a longer-term trip.

Regrettably for public companies, they are in the grip of Wall Street and its hunger to know everything they’ve been doing over the prior quarter…particularly in terms of making-money. Wall Street, unfortunately, is only interested in whether you made money today, this week, this month, and this quarter. This is not a brilliant way to run a business. Wall Street is not especially interested in your strategy, your leadership, your people or your marketplace, because they don’t really understand those member issues. It’s only interested in the numbers, since it can count those and, as long as revenues are a certain percentage higher than the costs, then it’s worthy to support it. Hallgrimsson would laugh at all this, even though his team is not floated on the stock-exchange. He would twist your arm and talk about building the right team, sustaining good morale, having top-notch coaches, having sound game-plans, connecting with your key players, and building an exciting journey to pursue…things that Wall Street is neither especially interested in nor doesn’t comprehend within many of its member companies.

Setting aside that public versus private company debate, it is vital for ambitious enterprises to set their sights on the longer journey rather than become fixated on short-term destinations. Such an approach demands that their leaders rise above the day-to-day fray on a regular basis; as we’re sure Hallgrimsson does. They need the discipline and see the absolute need for doing this. It would be evident in them holding regular quarterly meetings with their key leaders to discuss and reinforce their perceived longer-term journey.

So the question is: are you more oriented toward chasing near term objectives or pursuing a longer-term journey and vision? Those who pursue the latter have considerably more overall success than those who pursue the former.

To find out more about evolving a longer-term journey, talk with: