Good mission and vision statements should invoke a desirable future and create uneasiness with the status quo.
As you are reminded in the figure, the letter “P” in the P-O-L-C framework stands for “planning.” Good plans are meant to achieve something—this something is captured in verbal and written statements of an organization’s mission and vision (its purpose, in addition to specific goals and objectives). With a mission and vision, you can craft a strategy for achieving them, and your benchmarks for judging your progress and success are clear goals and objectives. Mission and vision communicate the organization’s values and purpose, and the best mission and vision statements have an emotional component in that they incite employees to delight customers. The three “planning” topics of your principles of management cover: (1) mission and vision, (2) strategy, and (3) goals and objectives. The figure summarizes how these pieces work together.
Mission, Vision, and Values
Mission and vision both relate to an organization’s purpose and are typically communicated in some written form. Mission and vision are statements from the organization that answer questions about who we are, what do we value, and where we’re going. A study by the consulting firm Bain and Company reports that 90% of the 500 firms surveyed issue some form of mission and vision statements. [1] Moreover, firms with clearly communicated, widely understood, and collectively shared mission and vision have been shown to perform better than those without them, with the caveat that they related to effectiveness only when strategy and goals and objectives were aligned with them as well.
A mission statement communicates the organization’s reason for being, and how it aims to serve its key stakeholders. Customers, employees, and investors are the stakeholders most often emphasized, but other stakeholders like government or communities (i.e., in the form of social or environmental