Your Strategy Needs a North Star

Visionaries Don’t Wait for Certainty. They Build It.

Sometimes the question almost comes with a sense of resignation: “Does it still make sense to talk about long-term goals when everything changes every single day?”

I get it: being a leader today also means living with a daily flood of updates, hype, new tools, new algorithms… things that are born and die in a 24-hour cycle. But precisely for this reason, now more than ever, we need clarity about where we’re going.

I was talking about this a few weeks ago with one of our international partners. We were in the middle of a quarterly review, and he told me:

“We still need five-year goals. Even if we know that everything might change in six months.”

We don’t set long-term goals because we have certainty. We set them because they give us direction even when we don’t.

For me, long-term goals have never been about control. They’re about identity. They tell you who you are when everything around you is shifting. They help you recognise what truly matters and hold on to your direction, even when the wind changes.

That’s why I always insist on two things when it comes to long-term goals.

First: involve the team. 

If people don’t feel that the goal belongs to them, they won’t fight to reach it.

Second: visualise it.

Sketch it out, create boards, turn it into images. Do it together. Not to make it pretty, but to activate parts of the brain that no report will ever reach. We do this all the time (with Canva, Miro, even Pinterest) because a vision you can see is a vision you can follow.

Everyone wants agility, flexibility, adaptability… but those skills grow in environments where the direction is clear. It’s like sailing across the ocean: you can change course as often as needed, but if you don’t know where you want to go, every route becomes a drift.

Throughout my journey, from consultant to GM of a company now active in four global markets (check out groow.ai), I’ve seen this pattern again and again. The companies that get lost are not the ones that make a wrong move. They’re the ones that stop believing in a direction. And instead, what we need is belief. We need goals that go beyond the next quarter, that speak about impact, not just performance.

Yes, the world is fast today. But speed without direction is just noise.

What we need is vision. And vision always means long-term.