Anchoring Vision in a Set of Governing Ideas

Anchoring Vision in a Set of Governing Ideas

Building shared vision is actually only one piece of a larger activity: developing the governing ideas for the enterprise, its vision, purpose or mission, and core values. A vision not consistent with values that people live by day by day will not only fail to inspire genuine enthusiasm, it will often foster outright cynicism.

These governing ideas answer three critical questions: “What?” “Why?” and “How?”

• Vision is the “What?”—the picture of the future we seek to create.
• Purpose (or “mission”) is the “Why?”—the organization’s answer to the question, “Why do we exist?” Great organizations have a larger sense of purpose that transcends providing for the needs of shareholders and employees. They seek to contribute to the world in some unique way, to add a distinctive source of value.
• Core values answer the question “How do we want to act, consistent with our mission, along the path toward achieving our vision?” A company’s values might include integrity, openness, honesty, freedom, equal opportunity, leanness, merit, or loyalty. They describe how the company wants life to be on a day-to-day basis, while pursuing the vision.

Taken as a unit, all three governing ideas answer the question, “What do we believe in?” When Matsushita employees recite the company creed: “To recognize our responsibilities as industrialists, to foster progress, to promote the general welfare of society, and to devote ourselves to the further development of world culture,” they’re describing the company purpose. When they sing the company song, about “sending our goods to the people of the world, endlessly and continuously, like water gushing from a fountain,” they’re proclaiming the corporate vision. And when they go to in-house training programs that cover such topics as “fairness,” “harmony and cooperation,” “struggle for betterment,” “courtesy and humility,” and “gratitude,” the employees are learning the company’s deliberately constructed values. (Matsushita, in fact, calls them its “spiritual values.”)

I believe there is a genuine need for people to feel part of an ennobling mission, but stating a mission or purpose in words is not enough. Many mission statements end up sounding like ‘apple pie and motherhood.’ People need visions to make the purpose more concrete and tangible. We have to learn to ‘paint pictures’ of the type of organization we want to have. Core values are necessary to help people with day-to-day decision making. Purpose is abstract. Visions may be long term. People need ‘guiding stars’ to navigate and make decisions day to day. But core values are only helpful if they can be translated into concrete behaviors. For example, a core value like ‘openness’ requires the skills of reflection and inquiry within an overall context of trusting and supporting one another.