Business and Investment Center

Your mission statement becomes the second stake in the ground for building your story, writing your business plan, and achieving any behavior changes necessary to reach the strategic goals. A mission statement defines the business you are in today by stating your purpose. Ask yourself this question, “If we went out of business today, what hole would be left in the business world?” The mission can also become a rally point for employees.

Having a rally point is especially important during times of high stress common in today’s business world. Leaders throughout history have recognized and used rally points to bring people together. Finding a common enemy is a tactic often used to rally everyone. Translated to business, it means beating the competition, overcoming obstacles, and meeting challenges—all of which can galvanize a company into unprecedented action. The mission is quite different from the vision in other ways, however, and the two must not be confused. The vision statement is future tense while the mission statement is present tense. The vision may be a collection of ideas or a conceptual description of where you want to be in the future, whereas the mission is a single defining sentence of what you are today.  There are similarities. Both are written as if they are permanent but may be changed given the right conditions. Neither is whimsically changed. Both vision and mission can be upgraded and revised after careful consideration of changing events. Changing either item is a serious management activity that should be taken only after you’ve given careful, deep thought as to how to complete the transition. Changing the vision or mission involves cultural changes that must be dealt with over a period of time. Resistance frequently occurs to these changes because people normally resist newness. Change your mission when you have substantial information that what you do as a business has significantly shifted.

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The part of the visioning process is the vision statement. This is a statement that captures the essence or spirit of how you describe the organization of the future. It is very difficult to make a vision statement. Here are some guidelines for getting started:

• Make your description short and to the point. Sometimes the description is vague to the outside reader. That’s not bad. Because the complete vision is a long paragraph or numerous pages, the shorter vision statement is ideal for inclusion in the business plan.
• Don’t be concerned with the vagueness or brevity of the vision statement. Vagueness in sentence structure gives you an opportunity to have a quality communications event with employees. In fact, you want them to ask about the definition of the vision statement because it gives you a chance to explain details of your thinking. This was not meant to be a license to create a deliberately vague vision statement. There will be enough of those.
• Don’t try to write a vision statement that is so clear it will be understood by 100 percent of your employees on the first pass. That is just not realistic. If you want clarity in your vision statement, ask yourself this: Can you fully explain it to anyone who asks?

Getting a vision down to a single phrase or sentence is not an easy task. The best way to extract the vision statement from the discussion or scenario-writing exercise during a planning session is to let it evolve.

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