TOWARDS A PROFILE OF THE VISIONARY LEADER

This paper seeks to address the important modern management issue of vision management. In particular, it attempts to provide examples of, and to differentiate between three different types of visionary who have been the focal points for the theorists working in this area. It presents a profile of the ‘ideal visionary’ as portrayed by theory and provides a checklist of generic visionary qualities to help those readers who need to assess a would‐be visionary, and predict the likelihood of his/her achieving success at the top of an organisation. Finally, the paper notes that the strengths of the visionary are often the sources of his/her eventual failure. These strengths‐come‐weaknesses have been identified along with more externally generated organisational performance reducers.