Management Buzzwords Explained: Vision and Mission

This is the seventeenth in a series of essays that addresses management topics. The first ten explored "hot button" issues; the next ten satirize management "buzzwords." I base these essays on countless provocative lectures and irreverent discussions as a nutty professor of Business Administration.

Not long ago, I published an essay that discussed the word strategy as a management buzzword. There, I defined strategy as "the way an organization plans to fulfill its mission," half-apologizing for using one buzzword in the attempt to define another. I promised to get back to "mission" as a buzzword, so here goes.

As a field of academic study, Strategic Management has not been around that long. A watershed decade was the 1960s, when it became realized that Business Schools were graduating people who were properly skilled at fundamentals like finance and accounting, economics, marketing, and some other basics, but lacked the ability to integrate, or synthesize these skills into a cohesive view of the organization or a holistic skillset suitable for guiding it.

From that realization, business schools and their accreditation bodies started to insist that degrees include some program content that provided this exposure and skillset, though the framework and competencies were still ill-defined. What evolved was a body of research, scholarship and theory that today is properly called Strategic Management. This corpus of work gave us lots of buzzwords, including strategy, strategic management, competitive advantage, core competencies, and as it pertains here, vision and mission.

My thoughts behind starting this essay this way are hopefully to counterbalance a common reaction to these very bad buzzwords, with some legitimacy. I suspect no management buzzwords are met with more cynicism and derision than vision and mission, and much of it is well deserved. Not long after Strategic Management became accepted in academia as a legitimate (albeit immature) body of theory, consultants opened "strategy boutiques" and over-exposed some of its concepts. Now, I'm not picking on consultants, because some executives were and still are guilty of seeking quick fixes to systemic organizational ills, paving the way for one endless fad after another.

Yes, it is very true that you can easily find organizations where mission and vision statements are plastered all over the place, and everybody laughs at them because they simply do not reflect reality. There is plenty of blame to go around, so the best thing to do about it, is to just start over doing things right. Not that I think I'm right or even smart, but only because I am pretty good at keeping things simple, I'll define vision and mission in my own words.

A vision is an idea. From the standpoint of strategic management and speaking now to executives, a vision is an idea of what the organization might do or become, but will not do or become without your leadership. Anybody can have an idea. The difference between a vision and a delusion is potentially, you. Therefore you can be the difference between vision being an inspiration, or a buzzword.

One of the things that annoys me about the "management stuff" found in popular bookstores is that none of it is written by people who have only failed. It annoys me because there is no way to tell the winning formulas from the losers. As they say, "history is written by the winners."

More to the point about the business press, I believe that some of the published "winners" were just lucky and some of the unpublished "losers" were just unlucky - other than that, their visions may have been very similar. I don't know. I think there is a similar bias in the scholarly literature. One does not make tenure by focusing on the failures - plus they have an annoying habit of vanishing. So in a sea of so much biased information, I won't hazard to tell you what differentiates a fabulous vision from a delusion, other than 20/20 hindsight.

I do subscribe to the notion - and this is backed by the literature -- that the difference between the winners and the losers lies mostly in the execution, and that means leadership. So again, buzzword v. inspiration is, to an extent, up to you.

Now that I've just about buried that word, while some people combine vision and mission statements, I believe they should be different. I can be very much inspired by an idea, but what gets me out of bed is a more definite sense of mission, or purpose. My mission is to get something done, and I know exactly what that something is.

However, as buzzwords go, there all-too-often seems to be a serious disconnection between the mission statements plastered on walls, and why people get out of bed and off to work. The popular press and the scholarly literature are full of genuinely good technical advice about what should be included in mission statements. So why are so many employees so cynical about them?

It's because many mission statements were not written for their prime consumption in the first place, so it's no wonder they're cynical. Mission statements are published prominently in annual reports and in recruiting literature and on home pages of websites and on business cards and in marketing brochures and ... everyplace an external stakeholder could possibly care. Mission statements are even crafted for the eyes of the competition, always watchful of every public statement important competitors make.

This, in my opinion, is where the evolution of mission statements has arrived. I find it ironic but perfectly legitimate to continue to stress the importance of a mission statement as important carrier of a critical message to key stakeholders, even if the people who will execute the mission are not viewed as its principle consumers. This is reality.