Assignment: Selling the Vision
Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making
friends and influencing people”—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher
sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality
beyond its normal limitations.
—Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Kotter (2001) identified creating a vision as one of the defining characteristics of leadership.
Academics and business leaders alike seem to echo the sentiment; however, each offers his or
her own guidelines and advice on how this critical task of setting a vision can be accomplished.
As a scholar-practitioner in the field of business, you must draw on the work of others and add
your voice to those developing a strategy for accomplishing this crucial leadership responsibility.
More than that, you must develop a concrete mechanism for verifying the successful adoption of
that vision. Even if you do not occupy a central leadership role, you can use the strategy you
develop to help guide others in the field.
To prepare for this Assignment, reflect on Dr. Craig Marsh’s case study. Consider his
challenges as well as his strengths and how you have adopted a model for corporate change. This
model should include your organizational change or cultural change model, steps you would take
to change the culture, and the dissection and explanation of how these steps will influence each
of the challenges you face. Also included will be the mitigation plan to address the challenges,
the creation of your vision statement, and a description of how you will translate your vision into
measurable objectives. This week you compile these elements into one PowerPoint presentation
that is your strategic plan to sell your vision to your organizational team.
By Day 7
Submit a 5- to 8-slide PowerPoint presentation, excluding title and References slides, that
includes a leadership strategy for translating your vision into organizational success. In your
PowerPoint presentation, do the following:
Create your vision statement.
Delineate your plan for how you will get others within the organization to adopt it as their
own. In your plan, be sure to include the following:
o The organizational change or cultural change model you used as the basis for your
plan
o An explanation of the steps you will take to change the culture and how these
steps will influence each of the challenges you face
o A brief description of the mitigation plan to address the challenges
Your PowerPoint presentation must contain a minimum of five scholarly resources on the last
slide of the presentation. Additionally, in the Notes section of each slide, you must provide
detailed support, including relevant citations, for the bulleted information within the slide. Your
resources can be a combination of the Learning Resources used throughout this course and new
scholarly resources. Note: Your presentation should adhere to the APA Presentation Template,
found in this week’s Learning Resources.
Submission and Grading Information
To submit your completed Assignment for review and grading, do the following:
Please save your Assignment using the naming convention “WK8Assgn+last name+first
initial.(extension)” as the name.
Click the Week 8 Assignment Rubric to review the Grading Criteria for the
Assignment.
Click the Week 8 Assignment link. You will also be able to “View Rubric” for grading
criteria from this area.
Next, from the Attach File area, click on the Browse My Computer button. Find the
document you saved as “WK8Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” and click Open.
If applicable: From the Plagiarism Tools area, click the checkbox for I agree to submit
my paper(s) to the Global Reference Database.
Click on the Submit button to complete your submission.