Purpose Of Organization’s Existence

Truly great companies understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not. This rare ability to manage continuity and change – requiring a consciously practiced discipline – is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision. Vision provides guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate progress towards.?

We recommend a conceptual framework to define vision, add clarity and rigor to the vague and fuzzy concepts swirling around that trendy term, and give practical guidance for articulating a coherent vision within an organization.?

It is a prescriptive frame-work rooted in six years of research and refined and tested by our ongoing work with executives from a great variety of organizations around the world. A well-conceived vision consists of two major components: core ideology and envisioned future.?

Core Ideology

Defines the enduring character of an organization – a consistent identity that transcends product or market life cycles, technological breakthroughs, management fads, and individual leaders.

The most lasting and significant contribution of those who build visionary companies is the core ideology. Who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.

Leaders die, products become obsolete, markets change, new technologies emerge, and management fads come and go, but core ideology in a great company endures as a source of guidance and inspiration.

It provides the glue that holds an organization together as it grows, decentralizes, diversifies, expands globally, and develops workplace diversity.

Core Values

The essential and enduring tenets of an organization. A small set of timeless guiding principles, core values require no external justification.

They have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization. They have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization.

The Walt Disney Company’s core values of imagination and wholesomeness stem not from market requirements but from the founder’s inner belief that imagination and wholesomeness should be nurtured for their own sake.

The key is not what core values an organization has, but that it has core values at all.

Core Purpose

The second part of core ideology, is the organization’s reason for being. An effective purpose reflects people’s idealistic motivations for doing the company’s work.

It doesn’t just describe the organization’s output or target customers; it captures the soul of the organization.

Purpose, as illustrated by a speech David Packard gave to HP employees in 1960, gets at the deeper reasons for an organization’s existence beyond just making money.

The very fact that purpose can never be fully realized means that an organization can never stop stimulating change and progresses.?

Why Vision is Essential?

The basic dynamic of visionary companies is to preserve the core and stimulate progress. It is vision that provides the context. Vision refers to a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future.?

First, clarifying the direction of change is important because, more often than not, people disagree on direction, or are confused, or wonder whether significant change is really necessary. An effective vision and back-up strategies help resolve these issues.?

A second essential function vision serves is to facilitate major changes by motivating action that is not necessarily in people’s short-term self-interests. The alterations called for in a sensible vision almost always involve some pain.?

Third, vision helps align individuals, thus coordinating the actions of motivated people in a remarkably efficient way. The alternatives—a zillion detailed directives or endless meetings— are much slower and costlier.?

With clarity of vision, managers and employees can figure out for themselves what to do without constantly checking with a boss or their peers.?

The Nature of an Effective Vision

A vision can be mundane and simple, at least partially, because in successful transformations it is only one element in a larger system that also includes strategies, plans, and budgets.?

But although it is only one factor in a large system, it is an especially important factor.?

Without vision, strategy making can be a much more contentious activity and budgeting can dissolve into a mindless exercise of taking last year’s numbers and changing them 5 percent one way or the other.

Whether mundane sounding or not, effective visions seem to have at least six key characteristics:

Imaginable:?????????Conveys a picture of what the future will look like?

Desirable:???????????Appeals to the long-term interests of employees, customers, stockholders, and others who have a stake in the enterprise?

Feasible:?????????????Comprises realistic, attainable goals?

Focused:?????????????Is clear enough to provide guidance in decision making?

Flexible:??????????????Is general enough to allow individual initiative and alternative responses in light of changing conditions

Communicable:???Is easy to communicate; can be successfully explained within five minutes

Challenges of Crafting Vision

Vision creation can be difficult for at least five reasons.?

First, we have raised a number of generations of very talented people to be managers, not leaders or leader/managers, and vision is not a component of effective management. The managerial equivalent to vision creation is planning.

Second, although a good vision has a certain elegant simplicity, the data and the syntheses required to produce it are usually anything but simple.?

Third, both head and heart are required in this exercise. After seventeen or more years of formal education, most of us know something about using our heads but little about using our hearts.

Fourth, if teamwork does not exist in the guiding coalition, parochialism can turn vision creation into an endless negotiation. The time spent in formal meetings and in more informal, one-on-one discussions added up to a staggering number of hours.?

Finally, if the urgency rate is not high enough, you will never find enough time to complete the process. Meetings become hard to schedule. Work in between sessions moves slowly.?

Creating an Effective Vision

• First draft:

The process often starts with an initial statement from a single individual, reflecting both his or her dreams and real marketplace needs.?

• Role of the guiding coalition:?

The first draft is always modelled over time by the guiding coalition or an even larger group of people.?

• Importance of teamwork:?

The group process never works well without a minimum of effective teamwork.?

• Role of the head and the heart:?

Both analytical thinking and a lot of dreaming are essential throughout the activity.?

• Messiness of the process:?

Vision creation is usually a process of two steps forward and one back, movement to the left and then to the right.?

• Time frame:?

Vision is never created in a single meeting. The activity takes months, sometimes years.?

• End product:?

The process results in a direction for the future that is desirable, feasible, focused, flexible, and is conveyable in five minutes or less.

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The writer works as Leadership Coach. He can be reached at [email protected].