Tony AlessandraThe ONLY Official Site to Book Tony for a Speech

I thoroughly enjoyed your speech and found many new, useful ideas to use immediately in my business... That's a great presentation. Thanks!
--Rose Clayton

I wanted to pass along my personal thanks to you for speaking at our annual Program Manager's conference. All of the feedback that I received, both in person, as well as in writing, was overwhelmingly positive, and your talk was a big part of that! Thanks again, and I hope that we'll see you at a future Harris event.
--Amos Morse

Thank you for the kind words. Your presentation was the best of all outside presentations - everyone thought you were great! I look forward to the opportunity to put you in front of other clients of ours in the future.
--Jay

Tony's presentation had real impact. The points he made were not only relevant to our audience, they were delivered in a way to make them memorable and fun. It was great to have such an important topic delivered with punch as well as humor. His anecdotes were fabulous. Ask him about the pots and pans.
--Corrine Smith

Thanks so much for your presentation at NSA San Diego last week. It was the best combination of practical tips and inspiration that I have seen at an NSA meeting ever! Thanks again for your powerful message and willingness to spend so much time with those of us starting out.
--Jim Cartmill

Utilize Your Visionary Genius

To say that Einstein was a visionary genius is putting it very mildly. His vision extended all the way back to the beginning of time, and out to the most distant reaches of the universe. Many elements of Einstein's vision were truly revolutionary within the scientific context of his time. There were certainly people who would have liked to disagree with him. When Einstein said that space was curved, there were those who would just as soon have stuck with flat space, just as their ancestors would have argued for a flat earth. But fortunately for Einstein, he didn't really have to persuade anyone about his theories in the way that earlier visionaries had to. Einstein's concepts were stated in the rigorous language of mathematics. There was no disagreeing with them, because they were already proven within the terminology that science had universally agreed to accept.

As you develop your own visionary capabilities, however, you probably won't have the benefit of mathematical proof. You'll most likely have to persuade others to buy into your vision using the regular old English language -- and your ability to do that is just as important as your ideas themselves. If you have the power to imagine, the power to be creative, and the power to inspire your vision in others, you're going to be more influential than someone who can't. It's that simple.

Needless to say, a vision doesn't have to be a whole new way of looking at the universe. You can be a visionary -- even a visionary genius -- without being another Einstein. A vision can simply be your picture of a desired state of affairs at some point in the future.

Suppose three people are looking at an open field just outside the city limits. One person sees a baseball diamond for kids to play on. Another sees a mini-mall with convenient little shops. The third person sees the perfect place for low-income housing. Those three are very different visions. Yet, assuming that this plot of land is waiting to be developed, someone's vision will win out. Whose vision will it be? Hopefully, it will be the person with the "best" idea -- financially, ecologically, ethically, and in a hundred other ways. But actually, it will probably be the person who's most effective at getting others to buy into his or her vision. And the reality is that winning vision may be the best one -- or it may not be.

How do you go about making your vision attractive to other people? "What-if" questions can be the starting point. Get people thinking beyond their rules or limitations. In his excellent book entitled A
Whack on the Side of the Head, Roger von Oech calls it "getting into a germinal frame of mind." That's like a garden bed with rich, black dirt where seeds get a good start on germination. What-if questions allow people to free themselves from ingrained assumptions about how things are done or what's even possible.

When you first introduce them, a lot of your "what-if" speculations may sound impractical and unrealistic -- or at least I hope so. But embedded within the impractical you can plant a seed of practicality. Von Oech cites the example of an engineer at a large chemical company. His "what-if" suggested mixing gunpowder into paint products. Then when the surface needed repainting, they could blow the old paint off of it.

True, that's not very practical. But it did open the idea of having something within the paint that allowed for it to be removed easily. The engineer's what-if question opened up everyone's thinking about putting additives in the paint. One additive would be in the paint when you bought it. It would be inert until another substance was spread on the surface. When the two chemicals interacted -- bingo (!) the paint would come off easily.

Visions are born for all sorts of reasons: to make money, to end a problem, to improve a situation, to create an alternative, to have more fun. To turn vision into reality, the key is stopping people's critical instincts from coming in too soon. "What if" questions are great to use on yourself, and they're essential for sharing your vision with others.