Transformation Framework: Vision - More Than Profit

Visionary organizations are characterized by “pragmatic idealism.”[1] Two parts to this are apparent. First, their guiding principles are abundantly clear.[2] Core values were written, public, and are treated as enduring facts. Second, these values support a piercing simplicity.[3] With a small number of values – usually three to five – visionary organizations make it very clear what they considered to be their central purpose and things they considered inviolable. By defining core values so clearly, visionary organizations guide, inspire, and clarify decision making even in the most difficult situations. We might think core values are mere vaporware or create a constraining system that retards progress. In fact neither is the case. By establishing those few things that are so important as to be core values, visionary corporations free themselves to change anything and everything else if doing so helps accomplish their mission.[4] ?Here, the characteristics of HC are apparent, though at a comparatively qualitative level. Like coming to a HC, clarifying values takes time. Visionary organizations put a great deal of time, money, and energy solidifying their values, mission and vision statement and into the indoctrination of new employees, managers and leaders in the same.[5]

What is perhaps odd is that there does not seem to be a “right” ideology.[6] There is simply no commanding consistency in the purposes and ideologies of visionary corporations.[7] For example Johnson and Johnson and WalMart focused on customers, HP and Marriott on employees, Ford and Disney on product, and Sony & Boeing on risk.[8] It seems the particular vision, mission, and values are not so important as deciding what they are and keeping them constant such that the enterprise’s purpose and values effect everything else.

Clock Building and More Than Profits, not only impact the formation and conduct of an enterprise but the kind of it takes as well. For example, Merck intentionally took a loss on a product that market analysis indicated there was not desire, and customers had not expressed a need, for.[9] However, fielding such a product so fit their values and mission they were willing to take a long-term business risk on the judgment that both government regulators and customers would realize the benefit, then pursued both to help convince them of the product’s underlying value.[10] Merck’s CC, and others’ CCs, show no similar foresight, tending to stick to shorter term return-on-investment calculations.[11] As devil’s advocate, we might suggest values did not play a part. Merck may have only been in it for the money. However, there would have been many easier ways to accomplish that end. It was their values that instigated the risk to begin with.

[1] Last, 48.

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[6] Last, 67.

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