Your vision statement for your group, presented both orally and in writing, is one of your most important and memorable acts as a leader. It should be given a great deal of advance thought and planning ahead of time, and you should be sure to vet it with a number of people who will give you good and frank advice. Although they can be intimidating, vision statements are usually full of positivity and forward thinking, are a great source of inspiration to your group, and serve as the ultimate frame of reference. This chapter describes difference between “mission” and “vision,” and how to develop both types of statements. It discusses the three “pillars” of academic medicine – clinical, research, and education – but also additional pillars worth considering as you develop your mission and vision statements. It goes into how to set goals, metrics, and milestones for your vision statement, as well timelines for achieving them. It then describes how to get your group to fully understand your vision and rally behind it, and concludes with a discussion of how to periodically reassess and recalibrate your vision.

Prepositions typically denote relations in space or time, but this is not definitive. Our analysis of prepositions diverges significantly from the traditional view. Where that requires PPs to have NP objects, we allow a much fuller range of complements, including content clauses and no complement, making many traditional ‘subordinating conjunctions’ and adverbs prepositions. Prepositions rarely have inflected forms. They can usually be modified by AdvPs, notably ‘right’ and ‘straight’.

PPs commonly function as complements and adjuncts. They may function predicative complements, but rarely in ‘become’ VPs. As adjuncts, PPs don’t require a predicand. A number of prepositions have grammaticized uses, such as ‘by’ in passive clauses. Many prepositions can be stranded or fronted, a choice affected by various syntactic factors. Some unusual prepositions, such as ‘ago’, must follow a measure expression.

Certain verbs license particles, dependents that may appear between a verb and its object, an unusual situation, usually a PP. Many verb + preposition combinations have idiomatic meanings, but we reject the ‘phrasal verb’ analysis because the combinations are not phrases.

Carrying out the innovation creation and delivery plan that was created in the first execution stage is the aim of this final level of The Innovation Pyramid. Launching new innovations has challenges beyond those of a typical internal-company project in that they generally involve collaborators and adopters outside the innovation-creating organization. This means that multiple environments and multiple points-of-view, in addition to the innovation-creator's internal environment and point-of-view, must be appraised. A modification of Drucker's core management-by-objective framework is introduced to assure alignment of all the people and activities associated with the plan's successful implementation.

The remainder of the chapter focuses on performing a post-execution variance evaluation of the plan's implementation. Such a review allows the implementation team to hone in on the learnings attained from carrying out the developed plan. All four aspects of the plan are reviewed: Operations, Delivery, Resources and Risks. A poor plan execution does not automatically mean the implementation team underperformed. The issue may lie with people or environments well beyond the core team.