“Life has an odd way of throwing me curveballs,” I thought a decade ago. Just as I had decided to write Guiding Growth, it was hard to imagine that I was writing about something I had never believed in only a few years earlier.

Through the 1980s and well into the ‘90s, I was telling the world of my hard-core cynicism about the need for organizations to have a vision. The curmudgeonly cynic of management fads and all things that even smelled like a craze, I saw vision as ripe for the picking. Atheism is probably a better word to describe my attitude then, given the zealousness of the believers.

But by the back-end of the 1990s, I found myself transformed into a veritable believer. I saw how a well-articulated and fully-implemented vision could positively impact organizational performance, often profoundly.

After conducting two major research projects I effectively disproved my hypothesis of the meaninglessness of visions, it was time to eat crow. It was a stunning realization for me, and I published the results originally in MIT's Sloan Management Review. Executives who read the piece were asking for even more information about how to develop and implement a vision. Weaving together research linking vision and successful organizational growth, along with consulting experiences that laid-bare the process for helping CEOs and executive groups articulate and implement visions seemed like the book I wanted to read. To my surprise, in spite of the veracity of vision, no one had written it. The Guiding Growth project was born.

While there may be unanimity in the belief that organizations need vision, there’s agreement that we’re doing a lousy job at it. As The Conference Board releases the results of their annual study involving 700 global CEOs each year from the for-profit, non-profit and government sectors, the CEOs continue to rank "engaging employees in the vision" as one of the top management and marketplace issues with which they struggle. They really believe in vision, but unfortunately they have a difficult time developing a growth vision and executing against it.

I’ve seen personally in my own work that it’s exceedingly difficult for them to stretch their thinking toward the future. They're highly "grounded," realistic people. They are drawn towards missions, which describe what an organization does now, rather than vision, which describes why an organization engages in these activities. Visions, therefore, must describe the desired long-term future of the organization and how it plans to change something in the world. It’s a future that is typically not quite achievable but not so fantastic as to seem like a ridiculous pipedream.

The vision-development process is therefore quite a balancing act. It requires imagination, a mental capacity for synthesis, and a trust in one’s intuition. Visions need to challenge people, evoke a feeling that draws people towards wanting to be a part of something quite special. When a vision is framed as something that is achievable within a set amount of years, then it falls into the terrain of a strategic plan.

I, personally, get motivated by challenging visions that reach out to the future and give me a beacon for organizational direction. Strategic plans don't turn me on; they don't turn most people on, but they are necessary. And the data we’ve collected over the past fifteen years is quite clear about the relationship of vision and strategic planning: those plans have a highly significant probability of being achieved only if there is an over-arching vision guiding them.

Seven years after Guiding Growth was published, I now reflect back on it for insight to why founders of non-profits find it so hard to let go. The program I direct at my university for non-profit CEOs who are following the founder of their organization helps the new CEO consider ways to lead more effectively in the shadow of the founder – whether the founder has remained in some capacity or has physically left. Regardless, founders still cast a long shadow.

Our experience with “Following the Founder” – now working with our third cohort of CEOs – indicates that one of the biggest challenges for the new CEO is to bring their own “voice” to the organization’s vision. One reason for the success of these non-profits was the aspirational vision articulated by the founder and the passion with which he or she was able to convey it. Over time, the vision and founder can become inextricably linked in the eyes of others and, while the founder is no longer the formal CEO, the “eyes” are still on the originator of the vision.

The vision process is hard. Leadership transition in founder-based non-profits is hard. But when vision is seen as both the challenge and opportunity for successful succession, we have seen eyes open wide to creative possibilities for the new leader to tweak the vision as a means for successful transition. Fine-tuning the vision can keep the organization vibrant, ready for its next stage of life, and can be a central force for letting the “child” become independent.

Mark Lipton, Ph.D. is Professor of Management and Director of the Tenenbaum Leadership Initiative at Milano: The New School for Management and Urban Policy, in New York City.

Watch Mark Lipton's Leadership Dialogue on VISION.