The following is an excerpt of a blog post reprinted with permission from AchieveIt.
Last week, in the first of this two-part blog, we discussed the need for and purpose of mission statements, which answer the question, "Why do we exist?" Mission statements give the organization purpose and meaning and speak to why people want to work for your company. They give rise to a bigger corporate purpose and serve as the starting point for operational and strategic planning. You should consider these two statements part of your strategic planning framework.
If your mission statement represents the beginning of your journey, then your vision statement is the destination. A vision statement is sometimes called a picture of your organization in the future, but it's so much more than that. Your vision statement is your inspiration, and the strategic planning framework for all your operational planning.
What you are doing when creating a vision statement is articulating your dreams and hopes for your company, as well as establishing a strong foundation for your strategic planning framework. It reminds you of what you are trying to build and the time frame in which you are trying to build it.
Vision as a component of the strategic planning framework
While a vision statement doesn't tell you how you're going to get there, it does set the direction for planning. That's why it's important when crafting a vision statement to let your imagination go and dare to dream — and why it's important that a vision statement captures your passion.
Perhaps the boldest vision ever articulated by any leader was John F. Kennedy's dream of putting a man on the moon. On May 25, 1961, in a special address to Congress, he said, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."[i] Although, at the time, very few people believed it could be done, the vision was achieved on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong placed the first human footprint on the lunar surface.
Like Kennedy's vision, your organization's vision needs to be bold, clear and bound by time. A vision to be "the best potato chip manufacturer in the country" is not precise enough. It does not provide your internal stakeholders with clear information about what that means, or when the vision might be achieved.
I spent nine years at Memorial Health in Savannah, Ga., where I was part of a turnaround team to save a hospital that was hemorrhaging $20 million a year. By 1999, we were last in the market with 37 percent market share, had 35 percent employee turnover and customer preference ratings had dropped to an all-time low of 19 percent. Nonetheless, in 2000, we advanced a bold vision with two parts. First, we were going to be one of Fortune magazine's 100 best companies to work for. Second, we were going to be ranked as one of the top 100 hospitals in the country. We gave ourselves a decade to pull off this transformation, and we called it Vision 2010. [ii]
Nearly all of our operational and strategic planning focused on achieving those two visionary objectives. Because our strategic planning framework was so strong, in 2004, a full six years before our established goal date, the hospital made its debut on the Fortune list, coming in at No. 54. The following year, Memorial Health rose to No. 48 on the Fortune magazine list and was named one of America's 100 best hospitals. By this time, market share had risen to 53 percent, employee turnover had dropped to 7 percent and consumer preference had risen to 65 percent — and the $20 million in annual losses were replaced with $50 million of annual gains. Our 10-year vision was achieved in half that time.
Memorial Health achieved Vision 2010 in five years because its strategic planning framework and vision were clear, bold, inspiring and time bound. That's the secret sauce for creating vision statements. When writing your company's vision statement, be sure you don't fall into the trap of only thinking ahead a year or two. Once you have a vision statement that can serve as a rallying cry for your management team and employees, it will have a huge influence on decision making and the way you allocate resources. The two pieces together (mission and vision) create the strategic planning framework that is essential to how you approach operational and strategic planning.
[i] http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/jfk_speech_text.html
[ii] http://www.memorialhealth.com
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Last week, in the first of this two-part blog, we discussed the need for and purpose of mission statements, which answer the question, "Why do we exist?" Mission statements give the organization purpose and meaning and speak to why people want to work for your company. They give rise to a bigger corporate purpose and serve as the starting point for operational and strategic planning. You should consider these two statements part of your strategic planning framework.
If your mission statement represents the beginning of your journey, then your vision statement is the destination. A vision statement is sometimes called a picture of your organization in the future, but it's so much more than that. Your vision statement is your inspiration, and the strategic planning framework for all your operational planning.
What you are doing when creating a vision statement is articulating your dreams and hopes for your company, as well as establishing a strong foundation for your strategic planning framework. It reminds you of what you are trying to build and the time frame in which you are trying to build it.
Vision as a component of the strategic planning framework
While a vision statement doesn't tell you how you're going to get there, it does set the direction for planning. That's why it's important when crafting a vision statement to let your imagination go and dare to dream — and why it's important that a vision statement captures your passion.
Perhaps the boldest vision ever articulated by any leader was John F. Kennedy's dream of putting a man on the moon. On May 25, 1961, in a special address to Congress, he said, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."[i] Although, at the time, very few people believed it could be done, the vision was achieved on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong placed the first human footprint on the lunar surface.
Like Kennedy's vision, your organization's vision needs to be bold, clear and bound by time. A vision to be "the best potato chip manufacturer in the country" is not precise enough. It does not provide your internal stakeholders with clear information about what that means, or when the vision might be achieved.
I spent nine years at Memorial Health in Savannah, Ga., where I was part of a turnaround team to save a hospital that was hemorrhaging $20 million a year. By 1999, we were last in the market with 37 percent market share, had 35 percent employee turnover and customer preference ratings had dropped to an all-time low of 19 percent. Nonetheless, in 2000, we advanced a bold vision with two parts. First, we were going to be one of Fortune magazine's 100 best companies to work for. Second, we were going to be ranked as one of the top 100 hospitals in the country. We gave ourselves a decade to pull off this transformation, and we called it Vision 2010. [ii]
Nearly all of our operational and strategic planning focused on achieving those two visionary objectives. Because our strategic planning framework was so strong, in 2004, a full six years before our established goal date, the hospital made its debut on the Fortune list, coming in at No. 54. The following year, Memorial Health rose to No. 48 on the Fortune magazine list and was named one of America's 100 best hospitals. By this time, market share had risen to 53 percent, employee turnover had dropped to 7 percent and consumer preference had risen to 65 percent — and the $20 million in annual losses were replaced with $50 million of annual gains. Our 10-year vision was achieved in half that time.
Memorial Health achieved Vision 2010 in five years because its strategic planning framework and vision were clear, bold, inspiring and time bound. That's the secret sauce for creating vision statements. When writing your company's vision statement, be sure you don't fall into the trap of only thinking ahead a year or two. Once you have a vision statement that can serve as a rallying cry for your management team and employees, it will have a huge influence on decision making and the way you allocate resources. The two pieces together (mission and vision) create the strategic planning framework that is essential to how you approach operational and strategic planning.
[i] http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/jfk_speech_text.html
[ii] http://www.memorialhealth.com
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Strategic Planning Framework: The Importance of MissionExample of Strategic Planning: To Accelerate Results, Stop Doing This One Thing
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