Improving your organization's vision

A performance-improvement consultant says that the best company vision takes the long view of success, can be capture in a glimpse, and doesn't frown upon rose-colored glasses.

I've been a consultant for 20 years and have seen a number of business fads come and go-or be repackaged under another name. My business cards have changed from productivity consultant to quality consultant to performanceimprovement consultant, but the work has not changed much.

One business practice that was quite common 15 years ago was strategic planning. I recall working in the early 1980s with a number of companies to help them define mission, vision, and develop strategies.

During the TQM craze that began in the late 1980s, and is still not completely dead, most organizations forgot about strategic planning. Change had become so rapid, plans often became obsolete in three months anyway, so it did not make sense to develop a plan for the next five years.

Management books said that the successful organizations of the 1990s would be the ones who adapted quickly to changes in market demands, technology, and other factors. Flexibility and responsiveness were thought to be the desired characteristics, rather than simply having good-quality products or services and a wellthought-out plan.

Just when everyone thought strategic planning was dead, it has again become a popular business practice. During the last five years, most major corporations have again started writing strategic plans.

Yet, for many, strategic planning remains a mystery. Everyone has a written strategic plan sitting in a file; most plans, however, are nothing more than a binder filled with buzzwords, flowery descriptions of future success, and hundreds of arbitrary targets.

Defining your future vision One of the keys to a good plan is that everyone understands the company's vision of where it wants to be in the future. A mission statement is present-focused and defines what you do. A vision statement is future-focused, and defines what you want to become in the next three to ten years. The mission keeps an organization focused on its key customers, products, and services, and helps when evaluating new business opportunities to make sure they fit in with the scope of the company's mission.

According to a recent survey quoted in this Journal ("Community Board," Jan/Feb 1998), 54 percent of all companies and government organizations have developed vision statements over the last few years. Based on my observations and consulting experience, however, about 75 percent of these vision statements are poorly written and fail to provide a clear vision of where the organization wants to be in the future.

The typical construction

A typical approach to developing a company mission and vision statement is to send the executive team off to a resort for a couple of days and make them work until they reach a consensus on the key components of the strategic plan.

None of the internal staff members wants the job of keeping all of the executives' big egos on task, so a strategic-planning consultant is usually brought in to facilitate the meeting. The consultant gets the participants to brainstorm a list of 40 to 50 words that define the company's future vision. The words are reviewed, prioritized, discussed, and then combined into a nice sentence that articulates this future vision. This sentence is often wordsmithed to death by the group for four to six hours, until everyone is tired enough to quit fighting or agrees with the proposed words.

The end product is usually so filled with jargon and trendy catchphrases that, if questioned, the executives would have a hard time explaining it in eighth-grade language.

The consultant likes it though, and everyone is too sick of the process to edit it any further. Most are anxious to get on to more important planning topics, such as goals and strategies.

The great do-it-yourself Vision Generator

If you simply cannot live without the jargon, you can save up to a days meeting time-and the fee you would pay a strategic-planning consultant-by using the handy little Vision Generator (see page 21) I've developed after reviewing the visions of many businesses and government organizations.

Using the words and phrases listed, string together the appropriate ones from each column to construct your vision statement. Adding a few extra adjectives from some of the lists won't hurt, and feel free to add in any buzzwords I may have forgotten. It's important not to use the same words twice, and make sure you remember to include important company initiatives in your vision.

Characteristics of a good vision statement

With that bit of fun behind us, let me now speak seriously. Real experience tells me that a good vision statement should be:

Brief

Verifiable

Focused

Understandable to all employees

Inspirational

A good vision ought to paint a picture in all employees' minds of where the organization wants to be. It is important that the vision be brief, so that employees can remember it without having to look at a poster in the lobby or refer to a wallet card. Brief doesn't have to mean stupid, however. Starbucks' vision is: "2000 stores by 2000", which is an example of a short clear vision.

A vision should also be verifiable. In other words, you ought to be able to tell whether it has been achieved. It would be hard to say, for example, when a company became "world class" or "the benchmark." A verifiable vision is one that ten people could agree has or has not been achieved.

A vision is also not something that should stay the same forever. Once one vision has been achieved, a new one needs to be written to encourage the organization to continually improve. The time frame for a vision is generally three to five years, as it is hard for many organizations to visualize beyond that.

The vision should also be focused on one or two aspects of company performance that are important for future success. Certain things such as growth, profits, safety, and so forth should not all be addressed in the vision or it becomes too cloudy.

The vision, however, should focus on the major goal the company is trying to achieve. Back in 1993, for example, Ericsson's Cellular Phones division defined their vision as: "Number three in market share by 2000." At the time they were number eight or nine in market share. Executives at Ericsson believed that the cellular phone business would belong to three or four companies by the year 2000, and Ericsson wanted to be at least number three.

For several years Ericsson focused its attention on this vision, developing strategies that focused on brand recognition and growth. In 1997, Ericsson became number three in market share, three years ahead of schedule, and are now number two. They are not interested in knocking Motorola out of the number-one slot, but are focused on a different vision that addresses financial results and product quality.

It's got to be understood by all

The only reason an organization would bother to write a vision statement is to communicate direction to each employee, so that he or she can help the company get there. The problem with typical vision statements is that most employees don't understand them. You can watch their eyes glaze over as executives roll out the vision in a series of meetings, discussing their desire to become a world-class, leadingedge, customer-focused company.

Most people don't use words and phrases like world-class and leading edge in daily conversation. Executives, consultants, and Dilbert might talk like this, but these people are the minority.

One company, whose vision was "Simply world class," conducted focus groups with employees, asking them what this vision meant to them. They received as many answers as there were employees. In other words, no one was sure what world-class really meant, but everyone had a guess.

The last characteristic of a vision statement is that it should be inspirational. It ought to make employees feel good about their company's direction, so they are more motivated to help achieve the vision. One of the best vision statements I've read is that of agricultural giant Cargill, the largest privately held company:

Raise the standard of living in every country where we do business, and double in size every five to ten years.

The first part makes employees feel about working for Cargill. Two areas Cargill has targeted for growth over the next five years are India and China Both countries have a lot of people that have to eat, and Cargill can actually measure how they have gone into other regions and helped raise the standard of living. The second half of their vision is business focused; they are looking for aggressive growth.

The vision doesn't say anything about profits, safety, ethics, employee development, new products or services, or any of the many other things a successful business must focus on. It's not that any of these things are ignored, and Cargill certainly performs well in all of these areas, it's just that they want to keep their vision simple and focused on their major goals.

The importance of vision

Deciding on your future vision is one of the most important decisions a company must make. Not having a vision will lead to constant fire fighting and a workforce that lacks direction.

Decision making and investments are difficult without a clear vision against which to evaluate each new opportunity or problem that inevitably comes up. If you select the wrong vision and focus on the wrong aspects of performance, it could mean that you won't survive.

A chemical company focused for years on their vision of providing the best service found out customers did not really care about service-it was fine already. Customers, however, were interested in lower prices. Thus, achieving the vision did not lead to the ultimate goal of market share by differentiating the company from its competitors.

Defining your future vision should require careful thought, and should not be delegated to consultants or anyone other than the senior leaders of your organization. If you have found that it is difficult and risky to really decide where the company is going in the future, you're right. There is a risk that you will establish the wrong vision. Not having one, however, or having one that is vague, makes it almost certain that you will have future problems competing.

Mark Graham Brown has been a consultant for the last 20years, helping organizations to improve their performance. He is the author of a number of books, including

the two best-selling books on the Baldrige criteria and his most recent Keeping ScoreUsing the Right Metrics to Drive WorldClass Performance (Quality Resources, 1996). Brown may be reached at 310-376-2836.

Copyright Association for Quality and Participation Sep/Oct 1998
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