Business and Investment Center

The mission must communicate purpose, appeal to a higher order, and define product. The mission statement then must present two levels of sophistication: first to employees for the emotional hook and second to the customer for the products, goods, or services they seek. Perhaps our test mission statements could be revised one more time as follows:

“We build affordable starter houses to help first time buyers become home owners.” This mission hits both levels of sophistication. The customers connect with both the product and the partnership between them and the builder. The employees understand the product and connect to the meaning of their job. The latter is most important because employees need to feel that they are contributing members of the company team. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Two schools of thought exist in management guru circles. Consultants have confused the buying public once again. Another line of reasoning has businesses developing a long, convoluted document that includes many items such as product, geography, customer targets, quality, and services levels. And this list is not complete. All this effort sounds logical, but it is in fact unrealistic, confusing, and unproductive. There is a place to address quality, but it is not in the mission statement. There is a requirement to deal with the issue of global versus national distribution but not in the mission statement. Discussing your values is important and deserves attention but not in the mission statement. You should be able to make an integrated model of business plan, so the mission statement does not have to include these confusing items.

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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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