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Archive for the ‘Vision’ Category

Mission and Vision Statements have been crafted by organizations for years.  The attention to mission and vision is warranted, as studies indicate that organizations that have Mission and Vision Statements quite simply outperform those that do not.

Here are a few varied snapshots from the e-book Mission and Vision Statements: Your Path To A Successful Business Future to show the difference these statements can make in your business and life:



A family-owned inn had operated for three generations without turning a profit.  The business covered basic expenses, but extra money was always scarce.  Within one year of creating a mission and vision statement, the inn reaped a profit of more than half a million dollars.

The public works organization for a city benefited from the use of mission and vision statements and applying them.  “It helped me to get a real team sense and feel for our Department” says a Public Works Director of his mission and vision journey.  “I also had more credibility with the team.  I was able to make it work so that it benefited the employees, so they felt good about their position.  It helped give me more credibility with the people I worked with and more cooperation from them – a great win-win situation.”

A director for a non-profit organization describes how this approach helped him sort out the questions to answer.  He says “To see within me the themes repeating themselves caused me to really focus on what I am about.  I found that “catchy” words lost the heart of it.  Because of the process I soon formed the language and passion of the true meaning of what was deep within me.”  As the organization continued to align their Mission and Vision Statements with strategic activities and actions, they got results.  They increased in size by 50% and many more satellite organizations resulted, all sharing a common mission and continuing to use the process to refine and reflect their shared vision for the future.



 

The CEO of a financial services company recently went through the e-book exercises to develop their mission and vision statements and he says “our company has benefited greatly since the inception of the mission statement.  Every company, family, couple or individual should have one.

Then why is it that in some organizations these statements do little more than signify a loss commensurate with the costs: books purchased, speakers and consultants hired, and seminars held.  Well, when expectations are not met, these statements are seen as being a waste of time and money and an organization continues to function as it always has.

This scenario plays out too often.  Mission and Vision Statements are not solutions – they are tools that must be used by willing and capable managers and supervisors.  These tools fail to live up to expectations often because of a lack of upper management commitment.  Where Mission and Vision Statements have succeeded there is top to bottom unequivocal support – it is required.

How can any organization, regardless of the type or size, become truly successful if they cannot answer the fundamental questions “Why do we exist” and “Where are we going?”  Mission and Vision Statements answer these all-important questions.  It is important to understand the difference between a Mission Statement and a Vision Statement and the role of each.

A Mission Statement is a declaration as to why an organization exists and defines the business the organization is currently in.  Mission Statements concentrate on the present and are a reflection of an organization’s core competencies – the basic skills or products provided.

A Vision Statement focuses on the future.  It states what you want the organization to be.  Vision Statements come from the heart as well as the head.  A Vision Statement represents a realistic dream for an organization and forces it to take a stand for a preferred future.

Mission and Vision Statements are critical to the success of strategic planning.  A Mission Statement identifies a starting point or current state of business, but a Vision Statement is necessary for an organization to determine the direction that should be pursued.  As the Cheshire Cat in the Adventures of Alice in Wonderland explained to little Alice, “If you do not know where you are going, it does not matter which road you take.”  Without the clarity of vision, your strategic plan – your roadmap to achieve your vision – may prove useless.  A strategic plan that is not constructed using a Mission Statement as its foundation and a Vision Statement as the way to set attainable goals for a foreseeable future usually send an organization into planning limbo. 

In addition to their importance in strategic planning, effective Mission and Vision Statements have other visible benefits.  These statements:



Help with decision making

Articulate a reason for being

Create organizational unity

Help link diverse organizational units

Provide focus and direction

Motivate organizational members toward a more desirable future



 

Once Mission and Vision Statements have been developed, they must be continually communicated, tested and lived by those within the organization.  This is key to ensuring that the vision stays alive and works.  Mission and Vision Statements are essential for an organization’s successful future but they do not come about without deliberate effort and commitment, by both employees and management.

The oftentime hesitation by an organization’s leadership is understandable.  By their very nature, Mission and Vision Statements will bring about change and change is typically accompanied by additional costs and risks.  However, rather than fear it, management must embrace the concept.  Some management tools fail to affect any change; but here is one that will do so if properly implemented.  Therefore the focus should be on ensuring that an organization’s mission(s) and vision(s) are properly aligned and used so that their benefits can be realized.  Be a vision driven business or organization rather than the typical problem driven business.

To learn more about effective Mission and Vision Statements and for a complete step-by-step system to develop your own unique Mission and Vision Statements, go to www.missionvisionstatement.com and order the e-book “Mission and Vision Statements: Your Path To A Successful Business Future.”  This seminar and workshop in an e-book covers: what you should know before creating your business mission and vision, exercises to develop your statements, how to test-drive your mission and vision and living your mission and vision.

Welcome to the last in my three-part series on Leadership, which I define as “holding the Vision, causing Partnership, and holding people to Account”. Over the last two articles I have explored the areas of Accountability and Partnership. This time I am going to take a look at the key to Leadership: the creation and keeping alive of a compelling picture of the future state of the organisation. In other words, a Vision.

If, as you read this, your organisation has not provided you with a compelling picture, one that seriously excites you, then your leaders are not leading effectively.

If you are the leader of an organisation that does not have a corporate vision you have contributed towards creating, that excites you and everyone around you, and that you are “holding” then you are leading an organisation that has insufficient focus.

What is my Job as a Leader?

Look at the definition of Leadership above. Your key job is to ‘hold’ the vision. What we mean by “holding” is taking full accountability for the job of keeping the vision alive, day in, day out. How you know it’s alive is that people are continually excited, inspired and committed to its achievement. If they are stressed, weary, overloaded and resigned, they’ve lost it. It’s your job to resolve whatever needs resolving to bring people around you back into that state of excitement and inspiration – back in touch with the vision.

How can you do this?

- The first part, though not easy, is simple: initiate a process to engage people in creating a compelling picture of the organisation’s future which is not just attractive to its customers, suppliers and investors, but also inspiring and empowering to those who work in it.

- Design a plan that will fulfil the vision, and focus everyone’s efforts solely on its achievement. A vision is, at its outset, just a set of words; until it is translated into action and results, nothing has changed.

- Now this is the difficult bit! Live, breathe and role-model the vision every day. Successful leaders never assume that their organisation is ‘on board’ with the vision – they go on and on and on about it. This, not the day-to-day detail, is the primary job of leadership.

- Concentrate on clearing the obstacles to fulfilling the vision. Don’t do people’s jobs for them, or chase them to do their jobs; clear the way for them to do their own jobs effectively.

What Makes an Inspiring Vision?

Great visions, and effective leaders, rattle cages. They are radical, contrasting sharply with the current view, and with the past. They demand attention. The question is, “What are we building here?” And the answer isn’t incremental: ‘more’, ‘better’, ‘higher’ are not words which are visionary or inspiring, but ones which are rooted in the past. You can only do ‘better’ if you are basing your objectives on what you’ve already done! Objectives by themselves are not exciting. A great vision communicated by a great leader is, and draws people to both the leader and the vision.

Whose visions are these?

(Answers at the end of the article).

1. To have a computer on every desk.

2. Land a man on the moon and safely return him to earth by the end of (this) decade.

3. All men will be judged by the merit of their character, not by the colour of their skin.

4. Low Prices, Low Costs

5. To become the most competitive enterprise in the world by being number one or number two in market share in every business the company is in.

Now, these examples may not turn you on – they were designed by and for the people they were meant to attract. That’s the very point we’re making here – visions on paper don’t work! You need to breathe life into them with your own passion and commitment. However, notice that every one of them is a bold statement of a clearly recognisable outcome. Every one is capable of measurement, and some have already been achieved. CEOs and executive groups often find it difficult to stretch their thinking toward the future. They’re very “grounded,” realistic people. They are drawn towards missions, which describe what an organisation does now and in the future, rather than visions, which describe why an organisation engages in these activities.

Don’t make the mistake of creating a strategic plan to achieve a strategy or objective in the hope that this will inspire – it won’t. Explore and draw out your vision first, to provide the context for your strategies and objectives. Articulating the vision is sometimes omitted because leaders mistakenly forget that they lead people. Computers, processes and policies don’t need enrolling, inspiring and focusing – people do!

Our experience of working with developing organisations is that the process of drawing out the shared vision is as important as the vision itself. And the process will vary from one organisation to another. But the genius of a great leadership group lies in its ability to create a vision that is simple enough to be really understood and remembered, credible enough to be embraced by all, and, above all, special and inspiring enough to have everyone committed fully to working continually towards attaining it.

Here are some examples of companies who have succeeded through their relentless determination to see through their vision:

Whole Foods Market does not just have a myopic focus on the bottom line or share price, but is committed to a vision with more far-reaching aspirations. They want to change a part of the world in which they operate. Though they don’t obsess over the bottom line, their earnings growth rate is triple that of the industry in which they operate. And their share price over the past two years has more than doubled.

Oakley, a top-end designer and manufacturer of sporting accessories and eyewear, is another good example. It doesn’t even have a formal vision “statement”, but is nonetheless vision-driven. The organisation doesn’t look much at the short term, but is continually stretching its people to be more creative and innovative. It’s an innovation machine, cranking out amazing new products through home-grown technology. They are operating in a very difficult market at the moment, but have huge margins and market share.

eBay gets it, too. Why? Because they realise the best talent is attracted to firms with a compelling vision. The people who work there do so for reasons they consider far more important than things like “maximizing shareholder value.” They work there so “everybody on the planet can do business with anyone else on the planet”.

Profit and share price are the equivalent of the food we eat and the air we breathe; without them, there is no life, but they are not the reason we’re alive!

PS The answers to the originators of the visions listed above are:

1. Microsoft

2. President John F Kennedy. This is the famous challenge issued to NASA in 1961 – a simple, specific task and timeframe

3. Rev Dr Martin Luther King – this is an excerpt from the famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

4. Ryanair

5. General Electric – this statement was the famous challenge that CEO Jack Welch issued to his division heads in the mid 1980s

Computer Vision Syndrome is that complex of eye and vision symptoms related to near work which are experienced during or related to computer use. Since the Computer Vision Homepage includes numerous links all over the world, you are bound to encounter broken links from time to time. The growth and continued usefulness of the this site depends on submissions and suggestions from everyone in the computer vision community.

An annotated bibliography of references for computer vision including image processing and other related topics.See the bottom of this page for various index options. The aim of the group is to advance the state of the art in the fields of computer vision and robotics. Use large image collections as data for classical computer vision problems such as object recognition. Computer vision meets digital libraries when there are lots and lots of images. Associated words provide semantic content which is difficult to derive using standard computer vision methods.

A screen reader, low vision projection screen, or an item like outSPOKEN or a similar system can be used to read a computer screens. There is computer vision research going on in many groups at Microsoft. Computer vision and other research areas: computer vision research give new process and task to psycology, neurology, linguistic and philosophy. Computer vision is the study and application of methods which allow computers to “understand” image content or content of multidimensional data in general. Some of the learning methods which are used in computer vision are based on learning techniques developed within artificial intelligence.

Most “color-blind” people actually have abnormal color vision such as confusing the red and green of traffic lights. The cones, which are best for detail and color vision, are in highest concentration in the center of the retina. The rods are responsible for vision in dim light conditions, the cones are for color vision. In this context, saying that an animal has color vision is like saying an animal has a tail.

Mammalian Deficits In Bob’s post, it was suggested that among mammals, color vision is more or less exclusive to primates. Elaborate color vision is just one such feature. In fact there are many other mammals with color vision. Many people think color blind users only see black and white – like watching a black and white movie or television. Trichromats are the people who have full color vision. Developers should also consider the potential for improperly adjusted monitors and projectors, resulting in poor contrast even for users with normal color vision.

The colors seen may be different than those seen by someone with normal color vision. An evaluation of a new pediatric color vision test. If you think you may be colorblind, you can test your color vision on-line. You will learn about a new “pediatric” color vision test for early detection. Purchase tests for school, aviation, hospital and employment agency color vision screenings. http://www.laser-vision.info/