Replying to LO26777 --
On the difference between mission and vision, my first thought was to say
as long as you have both embedded all across your organisation, it doesn't
matter what the definition you give to each word as you won't get 2 people
let alone 2 companies to agree. Then I thought maybe the difference is the
true vision like your soul is never ever to be measured, whereas most
missions could or should be set up to be measurable, trackable,
feedbackable -as transparently as possible....
Let me illustrate with a Japanese example and here I'll also pick up on an
earlier contributor's mention of the great process of Hoshin Planning.
Almost from its day of founding Sony has acted on and cherished a vision
like this
"If it were possible to establish conditions where people could become
united within a firm spirit of teamwork and exercise to their heart's
desire their technological capacity, then such an organization could bring
untold pleasue and untold benefits" Brand Chartering Handbook
I hope you can see why I feel anyone who literally tried to measure
performance of this declaration is probably never going to understand the
deep human aligning inspiration that vision should steer; and equally in
my book, Sony is and always will be one of the world's top 10 brands as
long as all its people stay faithful to this spirit. (By the way if you
have a Sony product you love - I keep a space for understanding why - - do
post us your view to sonyfriend@egroups.com )
I'm a great fan of simplicity literature. Some of which has found that a
company needs to align itself around one deep human caring ideology if all
its people are constantly to make simple sense of all the contradictory
paradoxes that a worldwide company encounters, eg global versus local,
short-term versus sustainable growth, value wins-win for all stakeholders,
unlearning as well as learning etc . In Western corporate branding terms,
we call vision the Unique Organising Purpose (UOP - a far more important
acronym for 21st c marketers than the better known 20th C USP). In
companies that are true to UOP, employees are proud communally because of
unique shared purpose and passionate about translating this into their
individual actions. The purpose, the vision, is a higher order goal than
making the next quarter's numbers. The purpose enables everyone to live
brand reality, an idea far richer for human beings than the advertising of
brand image.
Enter Hoshin Planning. As I understand the term , many a Japanese CEO
periodically circulates a challenge to every manager, team (or even every
employee). Rough translation: "This is our next big challenge/mission
which we must accomplish to be true to our UOP - RSVP with what you are
going to do about this given the activities you are responsible for". At
this mission controlling level, you can see that we could set or
self-appraise goals and measurements. However , I should also remark that
some have told me that the Japanese see Hoshin Planning as more of a
process of narrowing gaps in action learning. So for example if a
particular employee very politely replies with my activities I don't see
how to address the challenge, that's fine if that's what the CEO's
secretariat also sees. But if they were expecting specific actions,
there's a "DO NOW" learning organisation gap that needs filling at very
specific individual or team level.
Chris Macrae, email wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
Author "Brand Chartering Handbook - how brand organisations learn living
scripts"
Chief Brand Officer Association, Founding Group
--"Chris Macrae" <wcbn007@easynet.co.uk>
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