DEVELOPING A VISION FOR YOUR BUSINESS A FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT

DEVELOPING A VISION FOR YOUR
BUSINESS
A FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT
SR30 | SEPTEMBER 2010
INSPIRING CONFIDENCE
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Chris Jackson
Head of faculty
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E [email protected]
Emma Riddell
Technical manager
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E [email protected]
Rick Payne
Finance direction programme
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E [email protected]
Caroline Wigham
Services manager
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E [email protected]
The aim of this series of special reports is
to provide faculty members with a review
of a topical theme within the subject areas
of finance and management, offering
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review of the practical application of
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FOREWORD
A SENSE OF DIRECTION
When I first proposed the idea of a special report on business visions I was
met with two strongly held views; firstly: that visions are hugely valuable in
providing businesses with a sense of direction and employees with a common
sense of purpose; secondly: that visions are no more than empty talk which
bear no relation to how businesses really operate. Hopefully, after reading this
report you will be convinced that the first view has merit, but at the very least
you should feel well informed enough to know which camp you belong to.
Some of the cynicism surrounding visions may well be caused by the lack of
consistency in the way the term vision is defined. As I discovered, when
trawling the internet for the examples that we have included in the appendix,
one person’s mission is another person’s vision. The terms are often used
interchangeably.
Even within this report opinions differ over the way in which visions should
best be used. For example, some people suggest that a vision should be a
succinct and inspiring statement of how the world will be once the vision is
reality; others recommend the use of a longer ‘vision story’ which describes
the future state in enough detail for people to experience it and imagine
themselves part of it.
You will need to decide which definitions and methodologies will work best
for you and your business. Whatever approach you take there are some
aspects that our experts seem to agree on:
• as a leader, walk the talk – lofty words are no use without consistent actions;
• avoid buzz-words and management speak;
• don’t work alone: consider using representatives from throughout the
business to help develop and refine your vision; and
• ensure that those within the organisation understand how the vision relates
to their day-to-day job.
In the course of developing this report a number of pertinent questions were
asked by the review panel. We have used these to develop a questions and
answers section. Visit the Finance and Management Faculty’s LinkedIn group
to have a look the queries raised, and also to add your own voice to the
debate at www.linkedin.com
The questions and answers will also be available on the faculty website at
icaew.com/specialreports
We hope you find this report useful. If you have any comments on this
report, or ideas for future publications that you would find helpful, then
please get in touch.
EMMA RIDDELL
Chris Jackson
Head of faculty
Emma Riddell
Technical manager
TECPLM9505
DEVELOPING A VISION FOR YOUR
BUSINESS
A special report published by:
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London EC2R 6EA
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ISBN 978-0-85760-054-7
2
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DEVELOPING A VISION FOR YOUR BUSINESS
CONTENTS
04 INTRODUCTION
TAKE TIME TO PERFECT YOUR VISION
Before developing a strategy for business, it is important that
we fully understand the different concepts involved. Tony
Powell introduces us to vision and mission statements.
20 LESSONS FROM HISTORY
VISION: HOW THE PAST CAN HELP TODAY’S COMPANIES
Visionaries of the past have had a major impact on forming
today's world. Morgen Witzel provides some examples which
may inspire you.
05 OVERVIEW
DEFINING A VISION AND VALUES FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Sarah Cook illustrates the benefits a well thought-out vision
can bring to your company and offers practical advice on
ways to develop and implement an effective vision, mission
and strategy.
23 WORKSHOPS
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR VISION
It can be challenging to develop a vision that successfully
encapsulates the ethos of your business. Tony Powell offers
practical tips on the process, including workshops.
10 THE ROLE OF THE FD
VISION AND THE FINANCE DIRECTOR: OIL AND WATER?
The role of the FD in creating, challenging and
communicating a company's vision is an important one,
according to Simon Hill.
25 APPENDIX
EXAMPLES OF MISSION AND VISION STATEMENTS
26 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
BOOKS, JOURNAL ARTICLES AND MORE and Q&A
27 PREVIOUS SPECIAL REPORTS
12 STORYTELLING
LAUNCHING YOUR ORGANISATION INTO AN
ACTIONABLE FUTURE
In this article, Ira Levin advocates developing a vision story
to draw people into the company's future.
16 LEADERSHIP
LEADING THE VISIONING PROCESS
Having defined your vision the next stage in the process is
developing a strategy to achieve it – which requires strong
leadership, as Siobhan Soraghan explains.
18 MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES
HOW VISION DRIVES THE PERFORMANCE OF A MEDIUM
ENTERPRISE
Jyoti Banerjee discusses the difference having a vision can
make to medium-sized enterprises.
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
3
INTRODUCTION
TAKE TIME TO PERFECT
YOUR VISION
Clearly defined vision and mission statements can make a huge difference
to your business. Tony Powell sets the scene for this special report by
outlining the key issues.
“I’m helping us go to the moon.” The legendary
response given by a janitor at NASA when asked one
day what he was doing.*
Working for ‘the elimination of avoidable blindness’.
The aim of the global initiative VISION 2020.
How great would it be if every day at work we were
working towards visions like these? It would be clear
what we were doing and why and should help guide
us when making choices or decisions – plus we would
have a ready answer when asked by friends and
family what our work was about. Sadly many of us do
not know our organisation’s actual vision or mission
statement. A few years ago, when working with a
client, a friend of mine put up a series of vision
statements and asked the people in front of him to
pick theirs out. They mostly picked the statements
put out by their competition.
So do visions and missions matter? Absolutely they
do – and I mention both as they do often get used
interchangeably. A well-worked and well-publicised
vision and mission can energise a company. But
many, in my view, are at best neutral – talking about
global leadership or being number one – and there
are still some that talk about, in effect, maximising
shareholder value. That’s really going to get the
people up in the morning – well, it might if they are
shareholders!
The advantage of an inspiring, well-known and,
crucially, lived vision and mission is that staff feel
involved and motivated. Importantly, it has to be
relevant to all the company’s stakeholder groups and
be something that is lived, breathed and
‘The advantage of an inspiring, wellknown and, crucially, lived vision and
mission is that staff feel involved and
motivated’
demonstrated by management at all levels – not just
a call to action found in the annual report or on the
wall in the reception area.
Get the vision right and the mission, strategy and
planning follow quite naturally. See Box 1, below, for
my take on definitions of these terms. Get them in
the wrong place and moving down the hierarchy gets
difficult. So, for me, the critical points for your vision
and mission are that they:
• have evident relevance – to all the company’s
stakeholder groups;
• are short and understandable (vision statements
that then need many paragraphs to explain them
are a good start – but they need further attention –
“If I had more time I would have written you a
shorter letter.”); and
• are demonstrated daily by the words and actions of
management.
What this means is that the vision and mission
statements are critical documents that need time
spent on them if they are to be really effective. On
page 23 I have outlined one approach that I have
used many times to help organisations develop these
statements.
Box 1 DEFINITIONS
Vision
A succinct and inspiring statement of how the
world will be once the vision is reality.
Mission
The organisation’s role and actions destined to
achieve the vision (think here of ‘These are the
voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year
mission… to boldly go where no man has gone
before...’)
Strategy
The means by which we will achieve our mission.
Planning
The detailed next steps that we need to do.
* From The Customer driven Company by Richard C
Whitely
Tony Powell is a self-employed
management consultant and trainer, and
is deputy chairman of the faculty.
[email protected]
4
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OVERVIEW
DEFINING A VISION AND VALUES FOR
YOUR BUSINESS
An effective vision can set the direction for a company for years to come. In this article
Sarah Cook outlines the potential benefits and suggests methods to help you produce a
vision for your company that reflects its true values.
When researchers look at successful organisations, they
frequently find that what they have in common is a
compelling vision of the future and a set of
organisational values that underpin this.
Published visions and values are today everywhere in
almost every organisation, from churches, schools or
hospitals to start-up businesses and multinationals. At
their best, they give people a sense of inspiration and a
Sarah Cook is managing director of The
Stairway Consultancy and author of
Change Management Excellence, published
by Kogan Page.
[email protected]
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
benchmark of how to carry out their dealings internally
and externally.
At their worst, they are hypocritical and irrelevant to
how the business operates, representing ideals which
are confined to employee and customer manuals and
annual reports – managers say one thing and do
another. An extreme, but relevant, example of this is
Enron, which publicly extolled lofty values and a highminded vision, before its collapse showed that a
corrupt and disreputable style had been operating, led
from the top.
However, I would suggest that having a well
thought-out vision and set of values is a key
component of the fast-changing 21st century
organisation. Clearly defined vision and values seem to
help the organisation run more successfully in a
5
‘All major achievements throughout history are,
arguably, attributable to people with powerful dreams
about the future’
customer-friendly and profitable way. A vision can
become a rallying call during change and can help
define the desired landscape of the organisation and
the direction in which the business wishes to head.
All major achievements throughout history are,
arguably, attributable to people with powerful dreams
about the future. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”
or President Kennedy’s “Man on the moon by the end
of the decade” are excellent examples of this.
In fact, advocates of the use of visions sometimes
refer to them as the “skyhooks for the soul”; the
igniting sparks that can inspire and energise people to
do better. To quote the author and consultant Tom
Peters, “Developing a vision and living it vigorously are
essential elements of leadership.”
Defining the vision
There are a number of terms that get bandied around
in relation to vision and values. Often organisations say
they have a vision, when in fact this is a ‘mission’. It is
The vision, mission and values of an organisation need
to be aligned. To bring this to life, here is an example
of one organisation’s vision, mission and values. This is
my own business, The Stairway Consultancy:
• our vision is – ‘to help organisations be more
customer focused’;
• our mission is – ‘to add value to our clients via the
quality of the interventions we provide’; and
• our values are ‘customer focus, learning, integrity,
passion, partnering and diversity’.
Figure 1 CORPORATE DIAMOND
Vision
The ‘corporate diamond’ seen in Figure 1, left, explains
the inter-relationships.
Mission
Goals
Values
Strategy
Behaviours
Results
6
helpful to clarify the different concepts as follows:
• vision – a picture of a desired future state that is
sufficiently appealing and compelling to drive change
forward – the ‘where we want to be’;
• mission – the purpose of the organisation – the ‘what
we want to achieve’;
• values – the underlying principles and ethics that
drive the organisation – the ‘how we want to act to
guide us towards our vision’;
• goals – the objectives or targets that the organisation
is trying to achieve – the ‘what we need to achieve
our mission’;
• strategy – the approach that the organisation is
adopting to achieve the goals that support the
strategy – the ‘how we will achieve our goals’; and
• behaviours – the way in which people in the
organisation act in terms of what they do and say
that brings the strategy and desired culture to life –
‘what we will say and do to bring our values to life’.
What is a vision?
A vision sits at the pinnacle of the ‘corporate diamond’.
It sets the direction for the organisation, where the
business wants to be. Having a vision for your company
means you stretch the organisation beyond its current
reach. For example, for many years Bill Gates’s vision
for Microsoft was of a computer in every home. Now
this is in sight, he has set another stretching vision, to
empower people through great software – any time,
any place, and on any device.
The criteria for a good vision are that it is
memorable, meaningful and inspirational. Here are
some examples of phrases which some organisations
have used as visions, though they may not necessarily
comply with the vision definitions set out earlier:
• healthcare organisation: ‘Taking care of the life in our
hands’;
• up-market hotel chain: ‘Discovery’;
• entertainment group: ‘Dream, Believe, Dare, Do’;
• financial services organisation: ‘To be the first choice
for customers and colleagues’;
• card manufacturer and retailer: ‘To enrich people’s
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‘Companies with a defined corporate commitment to
ethical principles fare better financially than companies
that do not make ethics a visible management component’
lives, help them express their feelings, celebrate
occasions and enhance their relationships’; or
• logistics company: ‘People, Customers, Profits’.
Developing a vision
Rather than leaving the development of a vision to
the senior team, all levels of the organisation should
have an opportunity to contribute to this. This
creates greater buy-in and a sense of ownership. This
process was recently used successfully with one
retailer to define its vision – ‘Making a Difference’.
A series of brainstorm meetings was held for all
levels of the organisation. This is important as it gains
buy-in at an early point. The sessions focused on
what sort of organisation customers, employees and
other stakeholders wanted to create for the future.
The output was recorded, and together with input
from the focus groups, participants created a short,
inspirational and memorable phrase that captured the
essence of the responses.
This was then ‘tested’ throughout the organisation.
It was important that people responsible for this
testing received feedback so that the vision could be
amended to reflect everyone’s views.*
made and development offered. The values were also
reinforced through a recognition scheme that gave
credit to people who had delivered inspirational
service.
Values are beneficial to the business. A recent study
carried out by Professor Curtis Verschoor at the
University of Chicago and published in the American
Figure 2 VISION, VALUES AND PEOPLE MANAGEMENT
Recruitment
and selection
Performance
management
and coaching
Succession
planning
and talent
management
Training and
development
Reward and
recognition
COMPETENCIES
VALUES
VISION
Organisational values
Values are the guiding principles of the organisation.
They show customers, employees and other
stakeholders how the business intends to operate on
a daily basis. They are a set of expectations we have
of ourselves and others. If values are embedded in
the organisation, they allow all other systems,
processes and behaviours to fit together. An example
of this is the people management process (see Figure
2, right).
If you have a clear set of values it can help inform
your competencies, which in turn will inform the five
key drivers of people development in organisations:
• recruitment and selection;
• performance management and coaching;
• succession planning and talent management;
• training and development; and
• reward and recognition.
One organisation I know had a vision of ‘inspiring
customers’. Its values were customer service,
teamwork, integrity, and learning. It developed a
competency framework that embedded these four
values into the desired skills and behaviours for all
levels of employees. The values and competencies in
turn drove the recruitment and selection process.
They were the criteria against which people were
performance-managed, promotion decisions were
* For more on running a brainstorming session, see ‘A
practical guide to building your vision on page 23
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
7
‘If people understand how values link to what they do, what
values look like in concrete terms, and their positive impact,
then they will be more motivated to put the values into practice’
journal Management Accounting found that
companies with a defined corporate commitment to
ethical principles fare better financially than
companies that do not make ethics a visible
management component. Public shaming of Nike’s
sweatshop conditions and ‘slave wages’ paid to
overseas workers led to a sharp drop in its earnings.
Employees define values and behaviours
Organisational values may be established by strong
leaders or by top management – however, in the same
way as setting a vision for the organisation, values are
best defined by employees. A series of short workshops
Figure 3 VISION CHECKLIST
Is our vision any good?
Our vision and values are well-tuned to
the expectations of our stakeholders.
We consulted a range of levels and
groups to arrive at the values of our
organization.
Senior management refers to our vision
and values to motivate, support and
recognise our people.
Our leaders manage change in a manner
which is consistent with our vision and
values.
Communication and sharing of
knowledge and information is in step
with our vision and values.
Our business processes are in harmony
with our vision and values.
Our vision and values are periodically
reviewed and renewed.
Key performance indicators are used to
measure, assess and improve delivery
against our values.*
We monitor and improve individual and
team performance in line with our values.
We use feedback to improve our people’s
adherence to our values, especially in
relation to our customers and suppliers.
We regularly survey our people’s
perceptions of how true we are to our
values.
* For more in this area, please see
‘Measuring strategy’ by Stacey Barr in
September’s issue of F&M no. 180.
8
Excellent
Good
More work
needed
and focus groups can begin this process. During the
sessions groups of employees, drawn from across the
organisation, are asked what they consider is and should
be important as guiding principles for the organisation.
The output is collected by the sponsor and project team
and pulled together to find what appear to be the five
or six values to which everyone agrees. In practice more
than six values risk becoming forgotten.
It is important to recognise that certain values will be
‘lived’ at present in the organisation; others may be
‘espoused’ values – ie those that the organisation
wishes to embody but which it may not yet be able to.
For example, one financial services organisation
developed a value to be ‘human’. It knew from
customer research that often this is not how employees
were perceived although they wanted the bank to be
so. Therefore the organisation had to work hard to
demonstrate this value in all its transactions with
customers.
To bring values to life in everything that happens in
the organisation, employees need to know how to
translate the values into working practices and
behaviours, to know what these mean in their everyday
working lives. If people understand how values link to
what they do, what values look like in concrete terms,
and their positive impact, then they will be more
motivated to put the values into practice.
Best practice is to describe the behaviours that
epitomise each value and that are relevant to all
employees. Recently, a group of 16 people from a
service organisation, representing all levels and
functions of employees both at head office and
throughout the store network, met to define values
and behaviours. For each value they brainstormed the
behaviours that they individually believed they would
demonstrate.
Next, each set of behaviours was prioritised by the
group to arrive at between four and six that described
each value and which were applicable to everyone.
Each person from the group then took responsibility
for gaining feedback from their peer groups about the
relevance of the values. Having gained this feedback
the values were introduced via a participative one-day
conference of all employees. The values were
reinforced by incorporating them into the performance
management system.
Another organisation has ‘enabling’ as one of its
values and it defines the enabling behaviours as:
• involving others in decision making, encouraging
alternative opinions;
• enabling freedom of action through providing clarity
on direction, boundaries and scope;
• sharing useful information and experience, helping
others to make informed decisions;
• developing others’ performance through providing a
mixture of supportive and challenging feedback; and
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‘Both a vision and values are most meaningful when they
are developed by a cross-section of employees who are
then much more likely to bring these to life’
• encouraging others to show personal initiative,
taking responsibility, and learning from their
mistakes.
Powerful vision and values should endure. The
Carphone Warehouse, a leading independent mobile
communications retailer, prides itself on offering
customers impartial and expert advice, the widest
choice of the latest product and unbeatable service.
To quote the company literature, “We have always
operated on the basic premise that if we provide a
good service for our customers, they are more likely
to reward us with their loyalty”. Carphone
Warehouse’s vision and core values, first introduced
by its founder Charles Dunstone, have remained
unchanged since its foundation. The company
continues to be driven by a dedication to customer
satisfaction that has remained unswerving in spite of
the many changes the organisation has seen.
The vision in practice
The difference between effective and ineffective
vision and values lies in the quality of
implementation. Those organisations which
successfully embed vision and values are able to
weave them into the fabric of the organisation,
update them to ensure relevance, test them out and
gain feedback on performance.
Based on observations of organisations across a
range of sectors, here are some principles to make
vision and values mean something more than a set of
words on a piece of paper or a sign on the wall:
• make serious efforts to define what you stand for
and what you are about. This goes beyond a senior
cabal producing platitudes and involves talking to
customers, employees and suppliers, internally and
with other stakeholders;
• figure out how to make a vision something to
which people affected can relate and feel is relevant
and meaningful to them. Take the time to involve
those people and build in their suggestions;
• if you’re serious about vision and values then you
need to reinforce the message day-in, day-out.
Remember people communicate just by carrying
out their daily tasks. For example, if you’re placing
priority on the fact that customers really count, the
issue must be on the agenda at every single
meeting;
• reflect the vision and values externally in cultivating
your reputation and brand, making your
organisation credible and distinctive;
• embed the vision and values into your performance
management system so that employees are
encouraged to live the values and are measured
against this;
• ensure communication is two-way. Be prepared to
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
listen to bad news when you do not live up to your
values and take action accordingly. Reinforce those
occasions when you are successful; and
• vision and values are for the long term, but a vision
and practices to support values need to be
periodically reviewed and renewed in response to
changing circumstances.
Mike Newnham, vice president of business solutions
at telecommunications company Orange, explains:
“Communicating your vision is critical, whether you
are leading a small entrepreneurial company or a
large corporate.”
Are you managing vision and values successfully?
Look at Figure 3, opposite. Under each of the
headings, make an assessment of your capacity to
identify and deliver a relevant vision and values. Note
actions to improve important aspects.
Vision and values during change
Organisational change heightens uncertainty and
makes it difficult for us to be sure how we should
behave. However, if guiding principles are in place
they set boundaries and offer a measure of certainty
to all involved in change.
Aligning reward to the new culture is equally
important. When a change programme was initiated
at the Defence Aviation Repair Agency, DARA, once
part of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), change agents
identified that the culture was hierarchical and riskaverse. It was clear that such a culture would not
survive in a commercial environment. A new reward
system, based on broad banding with an upfront pay
rise in return for commitment to accepting the new
culture replaced the inflexible pay and grading
structure that DARA had inherited from the MoD.
This helped to encourage change whilst still retaining
employees’ pride in the quality of their work and the
importance they placed on the customer.
Having established values and aligned processes,
change is more manageable and effective, because
the foundations of the organisation remain steady
while things above it move.
Summary
Creating a vision and set of supporting values helps
organisations to bring people with them during
change. The best visions are short, memorable and
inspirational. Both a vision and values are most
meaningful when they are developed by a crosssection of employees who are then much more likely
to bring these to life.
To quote Kwan ‘jzu (3rd century BC), “When
planning for a year, sow corn; when planning for a
decade, plant trees; when planning for life, train and
educate men.”
9
THE ROLE OF THE FD
VISION AND THE FINANCE DIRECTOR:
OIL AND WATER?
How, if at all, are FDs involved in creating, challenging and communicating a
company’s vision? Simon Hill explains the FDs unique perspective.
10
‘Many executives thrash about with mission
statements and vision statements. Unfortunately,
most of those statements turn out to be a muddled
stew of values, goals, purposes, philosophies, beliefs,
aspirations, norms, strategies, practices, and
descriptions. They are usually a boring, confusing,
structurally unsound stream of words that evoke the
response “True, but who cares?” Even more
problematic, seldom do these statements have a
direct link to the fundamental dynamic of visionary
companies: preserve the core and stimulate progress.
That dynamic, not vision or mission statements, is the
primary engine of enduring companies. Vision simply
provides the context for bringing this dynamic to life.
Building a visionary company requires 1% vision and
99% alignment. When you have superb alignment, a
visitor could drop in from outer space and infer your
vision from the operations and activities of the
company without ever reading it on paper or
meeting a single senior executive.’ James C Collins
and Jerry I Porras, Harvard Business Review,
September/October 1996.
Simon Hill is a director of finance change
specialists Everymind Ltd.
[email protected]
Visions are ethereal. Finance directors only deal in
fact. Never the twain. Ends.
So this piece exploring the FD’s role on creating,
challenging and communicating the company’s vision
could have been neatly concluded in just 12 words.
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‘For FDs to play their parts in the vision dynamic then
they need to tune in clearly to the business’ core
ideology’
But to do so would have perpetuated a couple of false
premises. So let’s not get sidetracked by the cul-desac of vision statements. Far more fruitful to explore
the idea of a primary engine at the heart of visionary,
enduring companies – the dynamic between
preserving the core and stimulating progress (Collins
and Porras – see above). Visions provide context,
bringing this dynamic to life and it is alignment that
really counts. This made a lot of sense when I first
came across it a decade or so ago. Does it still hold? I
think so and more than that, it is a sensible way for
finance directors to connect with ‘vision’.
Defining the vision
Defining a vision for the business feels like CEO
territory. But some boards are more collegiate and
collaborative than others reflecting the strengths and
characteristics of the individuals concerned. In most
cases the CFO is well-placed to act as a sounding
board and reality check. But too much reality risks
sucking the motivational merit out of the vision.
There has to be a note of audacity, boldness and
ambition to set the vision apart from any other
objective. Tough to get the collective corporate army
marching towards an uptick in profits of 5% year on
year. Global domination in ten years’ time? Now
you’re talking.
So the FD supports but doesn’t lead this vision
definition, but he or she must understand it well to
set the agenda for finance itself. Here employees have
just as much a need for a vision to set their work in
context, helping to create meaning and purpose to
what they do. “The best visions help keep things
fresh for the employees,” comments Richard
Hastings, VP Finance Europe for Kohler Mira. “Within
finance we have a balanced set of objectives,
consistent with the business vision that cascade down
to individual levels. It’s crucial we then pick the right
metrics and apply them to make progress. Finance
can set an example to the rest of the business in how
to make this work.”
Preserving the core
So much for the future. What of the past and the
present? For FDs to play their parts in the vision
dynamic then they need to tune in clearly to the
business’ core ideology. What is the purpose of this
business? What are its values? Clearly this runs deeper
than a list of buzzwords HR might ping across. Here
we are talking about the touchstone for decision
making within the business. Finance and the FD
should live the vision and values of the business. This
applies to all interactions, from business reviews to
routine reporting of key performance indicators,
where any departure from core values is highlighted,
rectified and learned from.
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
Stimulating progress
Great visions have real currency in the everyday
proceedings of a business. Remember this is more
about creating some momentum rather than setting
down a prediction to be assessed for accuracy. If FDs
are to challenge the vision, it has to be on this basis:
‘How do we know if it’s working?’ ‘How do we know
if our people get it?’ Rather than ‘Is this vision right?’
FDs also stimulate progress by ensuring finance
partners the business effectively. Do people get the
information they need to make good decisions?
Historic data should have a forward looking focus.
How is the business tracking against its forecasts?
What are leading performance indicators telling us?
What action should we take? All crucial questions but
certainly not top of mind when first thinking of
‘vision’.
Aligning the business
If a vision is something to strive for but rarely reach
then alignment should always be part of the FD’s
vision. Measurement and incentives are the key tools
in ensuring what needs to happen does. Both should
reflect the business strategy. Performance reporting
puts finance in the frontline of communicating
progress towards the organisation’s stated vision.
Inevitably it will influence behaviour. Finance
directors must be aware of the unintended
consequences the preferred mix of measures and
incentives might bring. Above all they must be
mindful that these are not the only things that
engage employees.
“Understanding what drives engagement in your
organisation, and crucially how engagement drives
performance, is a must for FDs and CEOs alike”, says
Chris Copland, managing partner at Engage Group.
“No question, engaging employees with your vision,
business strategy or change initiative will have a
significant and measurable impact on your bottom
line. Finance directors have a key role in this – not
only in getting the incentives right and
communicating progress, but also in providing strong
leadership and ensuring employees have the right
tools and environment to do the best job possible.”
FDs are crucial to aligning businesses and hence
making any vision a reality. Vision and the finance
director should be inseparable. More gin and tonic
than oil and water.
11
STORYTELLING
LAUNCHING YOUR ORGANISATION
INTO AN ACTIONABLE FUTURE
Instead of creating a straightforward vision statement, Ira levin advocates a
more detailed story to illustrate exactly what direction the company will take.
Storytelling has long been recognised as a potent
communication device. For centuries, across civilisations it
has been used to pass on traditions, teach, inspire, and
persuade often while entertaining. Stories make
information easier to remember and more believable. A
well told story has the capacity to be remembered long
after specific facts and figures may be forgotten1. It does
so by engaging listeners visually and emotionally in the
sights, sounds and feel of the context being described.
Stories provide people with a common, shared
experience. Research has confirmed storytelling’s capacity
to promote learning2, healing3, and it has been
recognised as an useful management tool4.
It has been 10 years since I wrote of leaders needing to
articulate a vividly descriptive narrative of their vision for a
desired future of their organisation. I argued that the
more commonplace organisational vision statement was
12
not sufficient to achieve the benefits attributed to a vision
in organisational life5. These benefits include providing
clear direction, focus, a sense of meaning, and motivation
to organisation members. Well articulated visions also can
clarify performance expectations and standards, as well as
serve as a reference for strategic decision making. The
limitations of typical vision statements are that they tend
to rely on vague phrases, clichés, buzzwords, and
management-speak. As a result, they take on the banality
Ira Levin is a professor at the Marshall
Goldsmith School of Management, Alliant
International University and is president of
the Levin Consulting Group, LLC.
[email protected]
icaew.com/fmfac
‘Typical vision statements tend to rely on vague phrases,
clichés, buzzwords, and management-speak. As a result,
they take on the banality of a bumper sticker’
of a bumper sticker. My review of the published vision
statements of over 30 companies across a variety of
industries discovered their use of very similar wording and
phrases. These include statements like ‘be acknowledged
as the market leader,’ ‘be admired as the best
organisation in the world’, ‘set the standards for product
quality and customer satisfaction’, and ‘achieve
sustainable growth and maximise return to our
shareholders.’ One can almost randomly substitute one
company’s vision statement for another with only slight
editing to accommodate differences in the nature of their
business. While such vision statements may fit
comfortably on pocket-sized laminated cards or placards
to be hung in the company offices, in this form they do
not offer the personal connection required to galvanise
the personal aspirations and rally the energies of
organisational members. Nor do such statements offer
the clarity of focus required to sustain concerted effort
toward achieving the desired future.
Instead, in my prior article I recommended that leaders
develop and articulate a vision story. The vision story goes
beyond simply declaring intent to achieve some future
state. It describes that future state in operation so people
can experience it and imagine themselves as a part of it.
The vision storyteller serves as the guide into this future
state pointing out preferred actions and practices, feats
aspired to, and results achieved. The vision story is a
compelling way of conveying highly valued, yet abstract
organisational operating qualities such as innovation,
customer service, and teamwork. Vision stories need to
adhere to the widely acknowledged key requirements of
an effective vision. These include clarity, realism,
credibility, boldness, attractiveness, action-oriented, and
future-focus6.
Box 1, right, is an excerpt from the vision story of a
large integrated health care system that was striving to
gain market growth by providing consistent access to
high quality, affordable care. Where do such visions come
from? Generally, they emanate from personal ideals,
hopes, and aspirations, combined with the ability to
imagine new possibilities. However these are not
sufficient. One also has to be well informed to
conceptualise what might be. Creativity and inventiveness
play a role in vision creation, but it is also the product of
the synthesis of disparate information. Knowledge of
one’s industry’s recent developments and future trends is
important. In addition, it is useful to learn about new
developments and emerging trends occurring outside of
one’s immediate business domain. Courage and audacity
are important to not only stretch the range of
possibilities, but commit to turning such possibilities into
a new reality. Visions also need to develop a shared
commitment among diverse stakeholders of an
organisation. Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, and Smith
(1994), among others, have long stressed the need for
engaging key stakeholders in a participative process of
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
conceptualising key aspects of the vision and translating
that vision to the ground level where it has meaning in
their daily work lives. This requires an iterative process of
multiple structured and semi-structured conversations
among organisation leaders, between the leaders and the
organisation’s membership, and among the membership
themselves. What follows is an overview of a broad based
participative process I have used with numerous client
organisations to develop and implement a shared vision
story.
Step 1. Scanning the landscape
The senior leaders of the organisation need to perform
initial work individually and collectively. This work involves
crystallising and articulating personal values, hopes, and
aspirations and then using dialogue techniques* to reach
shared understanding and agreement about a generally
desired, constructive future for their organisation.
* Dialogue techniques refer to the free flow of conversation where
participants actively suspend and examine their individual and collective
preconceptions, assumptions, beliefs, and the unspoken implications
associated with their points of view in the interests of gaining shared
understanding and learning. (D Bohm, L Nichol, & P Senge (2004). On
Dialogue, Rutledge, London.
Box 1 HEALTH CARE CASE STUDY
‘It is ten years from now and we have been awarded the highest
recognition for revolutionising health care in the US. We organised a
multi-day virtual conference attended by our members, employees,
and other stakeholders. Attendees include the public health officials
representing the communities we serve.
These government officials speak first about how their partnerships
with us have positively impacted the health and well being of their
community. Several note how the infant mortality, heart disease,
diabetes, and other chronic disease rates have dropped significantly
due to our community based wellness programs. They also rave about
the success of our new community based health care clinics that offer
a range of cutting edge services including preventive care and fitness
programs. These are provided in shopping malls, airports, restaurants,
and supermarkets.
Patients and their families talk about their easy access to physicians
and other health professionals for care sought. They express their
satisfaction with our new web-based video technologies that provide
them access to physicians and other medical specialists without leaving
their homes. They also discuss the comfort and convenience of their
hospital stays during which they received personalised attention and
compassionate care.
Many of these patients speak in their own language, a convenience
to which they have grown accustomed since we had implemented our
new individualised patient care strategy where staff converse with
patients in their native language and honour their cultural customs
and traditions...’
13
‘Creating a shared vision requires ongoing dialogue. In
particular, different stakeholder groups need to translate
its application to their daily work’
Next they engage in a learning process of becoming
educated about the key trends and developments
happening in all realms of the external environment in
which their business operates. These include the social,
economic, technological, and political domains as well
as what is occurring within their respective industry.
Leaders can do this by conducting their own research
and tapping into subject matter experts. One strategy
that has proven quite useful is convening a panel
comprised of diverse experts and futurists to explore
and debate emerging trends. The purpose of this work
is learning about probable occurrences that may affect
the business and offer it new possibilities. Once the
leadership team completes this work, it is time to
expand the circle by engaging multiple stakeholders in
sharing what has been learned. This can be done by
bringing them together in a series of large and small
working-group sessions to further refine the range of
alternative aspirations.
Step 2. Shaping a desired future
While the scanning work generates a broad
understanding of the factors that may affect the
organisation’s future business world and opportunities
presented, the organisation’s own mission and values
serve as the core frame for creating the vision story. The
vision story needs to demonstrate the consistent and
diverse practice of organisational ideals and values. This
work is best accomplished in a series of large structured,
facilitated meetings comprised of diverse stakeholders7.
The first task in building the story is generating the
overarching plot themes. Plot themes often reflect key
value propositions that an organisation believes will
provide it a distinct competitive advantage in the future
marketplace. Such themes might include: providing
customer value, growing the business, leveraging
changing technologies, empowered and engaged
employees, and operating efficiency. Mixed groups of
stakeholders identify and discuss actions, incidents, and
other scenarios that depict and perhaps contribute to a
given plot theme. These ideas are shared across groups
and agreement is reached on a final set of depictions for
each plot theme. The key questions driving the
discussions include what is happening, how it is
happening, and what impact results.
Step 3. Creating the vision story
Commonly a small group is convened and tasked with
writing the vision narrative. While vision statements are
often a near endless stream of nouns and adjectives, the
vision story freely uses verbs. Actors, their actions, and
the result of those actions are emphasised. Vision stories
are written in the third person present tense so that the
listener/reader is placed in the role of observer catching
a glimpse of the desired future in action8. They should
also tap into multiple senses as much as possible. Vision
14
stories use the common literary device of
characterisation to convey their messages. They do so
by describing specific behavioural examples of key
aspirations and values. For example, rather than telling
the listener or reader that customer service is key future
operating value, the vision story might describe the
following scenario.
“A customer brings back a product purchased for
return. She is greeted with understanding and the
payment is simply returned without inquiring about the
reasons for the return. We then ask if we might help
him/her find another more suitable product to meet her
needs.”
The vision story needs to be written in enough detail
so the future is described at ground level and illustrates
common occurrences of daily work-life. Use of analogies
and metaphors can be very useful. For example, the
work of a new product development team might be
compared to setting sail on a journey where a course
has been charted but the final destination is not yet
known. Or, a sales team might be compared with a
basketball team in the midst of a fast break where roles
are fluid and exchanged freely, but the effort is well
coordinated with a single goal in mind.
Step 4. Expanding and deploying the vision
Creating this initial draft of the vision story is just the
beginning. Now it needs to be taken out to all key
stakeholders to be discussed, examined, and refined.
Creating a shared vision requires ongoing dialogue. In
particular, different stakeholder groups need to translate
its application to their daily work. In doing so, they
should also be encouraged to add in their own
aspirations. Bringing new groups of people into this
conversation helps promote co-creation and consensus
building.
Often those involved in the initial creation of the vision
story are the ones who take it out to others. These
storytellers need to avoid the trap of telling or selling the
vision. Instead, it’s important for them to assume a
learning posture by soliciting and exploring reactions
with the intent of gaining and building shared
understanding. The primary objective of these
conversations is to refine and enrich the vision, as well as
make it come alive for the members of each and every
stakeholder group and area of the business. Different
business divisions or departments might be tasked with
writing their own version of the vision story that reflects
their distinct area of the business while remaining true to
the key themes and messages of the story.
Based on the feedback and input received, the vision
story may be rewritten and ultimately published. Yet this
is not the end of the process. Visions are not static
entities carved in stone. Rather, they need to be reexamined, updated, and recast periodically as external
and internal conditions change. Institutionalising the
icaew.com/fmfac
‘Visions are not static entities carved in stone. Rather,
they need to be reexamined, updated, and recast
periodically as external and internal conditions change’
new vision often requires redesigning key business
processes and practices to ensure they reflect and
promote the aspirations conveyed in the story. This may
include developing new business strategies, redefining
accountabilities, establishing new performance metrics,
reward systems, new competency development, and
reshaping the organisational culture to actualise the
vision. Departments and work groups can examine their
current operating norms to determine which ones may
require some modification or replacement to enact the
desired future.
A well conceived and articulated vision offers
enormous promise as a launching pad and guide for
mobilising inspired performance and aligned action
across an organisation. Yet, the traditional vision
statements fail to fulfill this promise because they tend
to be too general, vague, and impersonal. The vision
story with its rich imagery, vivid description, and greater
specificity offers a more effective means for
demonstrating what future success is being aspired to
and most importantly how organisational members can
contribute to achieving it.
REFERENCES
1. Sunwolf & Frey, 2001; Neuhauser, 1993
2. McDrury & Akterio, 2002; Koenig & Zorn, 2002;
Blake & Bartel, 1999; Collins, 1999
3. Bavelas ,Coates, & Johnson, 2000; Bruenig, Garrity,
& Barris, 1997; Divinyi, 1995; Guille & Boersma,
1992
4. Brown, Denning, Groh, & Prosak, 2005; Boyce,
1996
5. Levin, 2000
6. Kotter & Cohen, 2002; Lippitt, 1998; Nanus, 1992
7. Bunker and Alban, 1997
8. Levin, 2000
FURTHER READING
JB Bavelas, L Coates, & T Johnson, (2000). ‘Listeners as
co-narrators,’ Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 79, 941-952.
ME Blake, & V Bartel, (1999), ‘Storytelling in the
classroom: Personal narratives and pre-service
teachers’, The New England Reading Association
Journal, 33, 3-6.
JS Brown, S Denning, K Groh & L Proslak, (2005),
Storytelling in organizations: Why storytelling is
transforming 21st Century Organizations and
Management, Elsevier-Butterworth-Heineman,
Burlington, MA.
organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston,
MA.
JR Johnston, K Bruenig, C Garrity & M Barris, (1997),
Through the eyes of children: Healing stories for
children, Free Press, New York.
IM Levin, (2000), ‘Vision revisited: Telling the story of
the future’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 36,
91-107.
LL Lippitt, (1998), Preferred futuring: Envision the future
you want and unleash energy to get there, BerrettKoehler, San Francisco.
ME Boyce, (1996), ‘Organizational stories and
storytelling: A critical review’, Journal of Organization
Change Management, 9, 5-26.
J McDrury & M Akterio, (2002), Learning through
storytelling in higher education: Using reflection and
experience to improve learning, Kogan-Page, London,
UK.
BB Bunker & BT Alban, (1997), Large group
interventions: Engaging the whole system for rapid
change, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
B Nanus, (1992), Visionary leadership, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco.
F Collins, (1999), ‘The use of traditional storytelling in
education to the learning of literary skills’, Early
Childhood Development and Care, 152, 77-108.
JE Divinyi, (1995), ‘Storytelling: An enjoyable and
effective therapeutic tool’, Contemporary Family
Therapy, 17, 27-37.
M Guille & F Boersma, (1992), ‘Fairy tales as a trance
experience: Possible therapeutic uses’, American
Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 34, 245-253.
JM Koenig & CR Zorn, (2002), ‘Using storytelling as an
approach to teaching and learning with diverse
students’, Journal of Nursing Education, 4, 393-409.
JP Kotter & DS Cohen, (2002), The heart of change:
Real-life stories of how people change their
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
PG Neuhauser, (1993), Corporate legends and lore: The
power of storytelling as a management tool, McGraw
Hill, NY.
PM Senge, A Kleiner, C Roberts, RB Ross & BJ Smith,
(1994), The fifth discipline fieldbook: Strategies and
tools for building a learning organization, Doubleday,
NY
JD Sunwolf, (2003), ‘Grief tales: The therapeutic power
of folktales to heal bereavement and loss’, Diving in
the Moon: Honoring Story, Facilitating Healing, 4, 36 –
42.
JD Sunwolf & LR Frey, (2001), ‘Storytelling: The power
of narrative communication and interpretation’, in
WP & H Giles (Eds.) The new handbook of language
and social psychology, (pp. 119-135), Wiley, Sussex.
15
LEADERSHIP
LEADING THE VISIONING
PROCESS
Developing a vision may be fairly straightforward but getting others to buy into it may
be more challenging. Siobhan Soraghan offers some insights on the link between the
styles of leaders who develop and sell the vision, and its implementation.
A vision is a life-like description of the desired future
state of an organisation. A strategy is a feasible plan
that states what needs to change and what should be
left alone in the organisation, in order to achieve the
vision. Visioning and strategy formulation are an
intelligent, iterative process – you may discover in your
strategy formulation that there are insurmountable
obstacles to implementing your vision, or you might
find that you have unique untapped resources that
could give you strategic advantage. You adapt your
strategy and perhaps even your vision accordingly.
The visioning process
The source of the vision depends on the relative roles
and dynamics between the board, the chief executive
officer (CEO) and the management team. It can
originate within the board, come from the CEO, or be
generated by a collective management team process
led by the CEO. Ultimately, however, the CEO needs to
own it and the board needs to endorse it.
The whole executive needs to be behind the strategy.
This is more likely if the management team members
have all been involved in the process. To what degree
the potential synergy of the team is harnessed in this
process depends on the style of the CEO. It also
depends upon the maturity and competence of the
management team. Let us look at two leader
archetypes:
• charismatic leader – generates and holds the vision,
gaining buy-in through force of personality, clarity
and personal conviction. Strategy formulation serves
the delivery of this vision. Such a leader tends to
avoid conflict by directing strategy, using their
positional power to move things on. The upside is
simplicity and speed, possibly won at the cost of
robustness and of buy-in from members of the team
who may not be convinced of its virtue. This could
have knock-on effects for selling, planning and followthrough in the respective parts of the organisation.
And if the leader lacks clarity, followers may pursue in
good faith their own strategies which may conflict.
The charismatic leader does not require a mature
team, as success relies on their own charisma, clarity
and cleverness; and
Siobhan Soraghan is founder and director
of Active Insight.
[email protected]
www.active-insight.com
16
• democratic leader – harnesses the synergy of the
team in generating the vision and the strategy
through a collaborative process. The upside is buy-in,
rigour and the greater likelihood of clear translation
of strategy further down through the organisation.
However the resulting vision may be less radical and
less galvanising. This style requires maturity in both
the leader and the team, without which, the team
leader may take the reins back when inevitable
conflict arises. The resulting mixed message about
power can inhibit healthy resolution. A mature leader
develops a team with greater capacity for dialogue.
Strategies of higher quality result which enhance the
firm’s competitive advantage.
Leaders are rarely just one or the other of the above
archetypes, although they may have a preference in
either direction. Their approach to strategy formulation
will also be influenced by their perception of the
capabilities of the team. Here are some possibilities:
• leader as entrepreneur (eg Richard Branson, Stelios
Haji-Ioannau, Anita Roddick, and Alan Sugar) – they
often have a vision they are passionate about and to
which they are closely attached. Usually naturally
charismatic leaders, they are afforded loyalty and
power by those who choose to follow them. This is
common in owner-managed firms and small
businesses. It tends to be rarer in large corporates
where the management team is composed of
intelligent people with strong egos of their own. As a
business grows, such a leader may need to adapt his
or her style to be more inclusive;
• leader with a ‘right-hand-man’ – such partnerships
are less obvious to the outside world as the more
junior partner is often in the shadows. Together they
hatch the vision and typically the high-level strategy;
• leader with cabal – where the leader trusts and shares
with a subset of the whole team, possibly three or
four. This allows some balance of power and
perspective (better with four than three) and in large
management teams this is much easier than wholegroup engagement; and
• collaborative leader – the leader has developed the
confidence and skill of conducting democratic
dialogue. This kind of leader is willing to take the
whole team on a journey of maturation, through the
‘form, storm, norm, and perform’ stages. They know
this journey will take time but that the fruits at the
perform stage will be a higher quality strategy,
communicated with conviction throughout the
organisation.
Whichever approach is employed in vision and strategy
formulation, those involved need a deep understanding
of how the company’s culture is both helping and
hindering current organisational performance.
icaew.com/fmfac
‘The strategy should link directly to the vision and deal
bravely with ‘wicked’ issues critical to success of the vision, ie
those issues that cross boundaries and deal with ambiguities’
Communicating and selling the vision
For the vision to be implemented effectively, it must be
owned by and communicated with complete conviction
by the CEO. Communicating the vision effectively
requires simplicity, relevance and inspiration. Simplicity in
that everyone in the business can understand it.
Relevance in that everyone gets why it matters and sees
how it affects them. Inspiration in that it has a direction
of travel that is attractive and meaningful to people.
Leaders must clearly communicate the vision and sell
the strategy. Whether they manage the executive team or
a shop floor team they must:
• translate the vision appropriately for their team –
pitching it at the right level, bringing it to life. People
need to see how their personal contribution fits into the
overall big picture of how to achieve the vision. And
they need to understand how the values support the
vision, and vice versa. Stories can be a great tool in this
translation;
• involve people in developing smart, feasible plans to
achieve it – this ensures they understand exactly what it
is they have to do differently and why, and ensures that
staff are participants not pawns. A way to achieve this is
to elicit views and contributions when building a picture
of the culture, while inviting ideas on how to turn
what’s important in the vision into actual behaviours;
• allow people the time required to support any strategic
changes in addition to their normal delivery priorities
and commitments; and
• hold people accountable – not teams or groups, but
individuals, even if they delegate to someone else.
Being a visionary leader
Being a visionary leader in an organisation means more
than understanding, believing and communicating the
vision. It demands being wholly committed such that
one’s own priorities and behaviours (despite preferences
and habits) are aligned to support the vision. People give
more credence to a leader’s deeds than their words. If
incongruence is obvious, the leader will lose credibility
and possibly trust.
The leader at any level, therefore, must be conscious of
his or her responsibility to ‘live’ the vision at all times. For
some it is an easy choice if their attitudes and style are
naturally more aligned with the values implied in the
vision. For others, not so. If the stretch is too great, then
it can be healthier if the individual leaves to join an
organisation where there may be a better fit.
to leaders used to managing operations. In a steady state
environment an evolutionary approach may suffice.
However, tougher market conditions and heightened
competition force a more radical approach. A
management team used to evolution may struggle to
take big enough strides without the CEO’s sense of
urgency and appetite for risk, and without fresh blood or
external help.
Comfort zones and external support
The strategy should link directly to the vision and deal
bravely with ‘wicked’ issues critical to success of the
vision, ie those issues that cross boundaries and deal
with dilemmas and ambiguities. Examples include
whether to centralise, where to invest and how to
achieve consistent culture across the company. Vision
takes aspiration beyond mere operational improvement.
The senior team may be tempted to rely on its own
knowledge and skills, and to avoid the uncomfortable
dialogue necessary to generate step change. External
support can be an invaluable catalyst of the journey into
such delicate territory, while concurrently developing
both the leader and the team. Typical resources include:
• strategy/marketing consultancy – expert research and
advice on strategic options; and
• process facilitation – development of a process to
ensure a) the researched data is assimilated by the team
and b) ensure contribution by all team members –
sometimes used annually to catalyse and support an
existing process.
It is worth considering external support that both
facilitates and challenges the team (and the organisation)
to fulfil its potential. A good consultant should provide a
temporary steadying yet invigorating influence while the
team and the leader develop what they need to be selfsufficient.
Dealing with success
Interestingly, many visionary leaders fail to prepare for the
inevitable trap that awaits them once they achieve
success - the tendency to become intoxicated with
hubris. Over-confidence and rebuff of cautionary advice
from colleagues can lead to their demise and that of the
vision.
The mature visionary continues to entertain dissenters
and seeks counsel from those who ensure their feet stay
on the ground. The leader and the organisation survive
and thrive.
Moving towards a more strategic approach
If the organisation has a tradition of progressing
incrementally and of being reactive, to become more
strategic can demand an uncomfortable transformation:
thinking longer term, broader scope and systemically;
imagining possible futures and following trains of
potential consequences. These might not come naturally
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
17
MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES
HOW VISION DRIVES THE PERFORMANCE
OF A MEDIUM ENTERPRISE
In this article, Jyoti Banerjee looks at how having a corporate vision can aid the
performance of medium-sized businesses.
Possibly the most famous vision statement of all is the
one that Bill Gates used to drive the young Microsoft
business: “A PC on every desktop.” 25 years later,
Microsoft decided to change its vision statement. The
reason? Because it felt that it had achieved the goals
Jyoti Banerjee is a co-founder of M
Institute, a partner of ICAEW.
[email protected]
18
embedded in its vision statement. And because the
vision statement was no longer aspirational in the
way it once had been for the company and its
employees.
Both those reasons point to essential ingredients of
a successful vision: the need to capture the goals of
the company in a simple way, and the need for a
vision to be aspirational.
I have come across many who feel vision is a bigcompany endeavour. Most smaller businesses,
including medium enterprises, have little or no time
to worry about vision. Getting a vision statement is
something of a luxury good according to this view, a
icaew.com/fmfac
‘Smaller companies have to assume that nobody
knows what they do’
bit like buying yourself a Rolex watch, but on a
corporate scale.
Actually, the Microsoft vision is a good antidote to
that sort of message. When Gates and his start-up
team formulated the vision for the nascent company,
Microsoft was a little company. The fact that this little
company actually achieved enough of its original
objectives to need to redefine and renew its vision is
a heartening story for every other company that
wonders about the need for a vision.
In fact, we could probably go as far as saying that
a vision is a necessary component to achieving
growth, though it is certainly not sufficient in itself.
So how does vision help?
Here are three ways in which articulating a singular
vision for the organisation helps improve your
organisation’s business performance.
Vision makes your business communicable
Some businesses have all the luck. They pick great
names like Google, Nike or Apple and then
everybody knows what they do. Okay, it is not quite
like that. But the advantage that these well-known
businesses have over smaller enterprises is name
recognition. Everybody knows (or thinks they know)
what these brands are all about. Smaller companies
have to assume that nobody knows what they do.
What a well-defined vision does to ameliorate this
problem is to make it easy to communicate what
they company does, why it does it, and what makes
it different from everybody else in the market.
So what happens if you don’t have a clearly
articulated vision? Everybody then gets involved in
defining for themselves what the company is all
about. It is obvious that these different views will
never gel together.
Having a single business vision gives you the best
opportunity to ensure that all your employees in the
business, and customers outside your business
boundaries, share a similar understanding of what the
company is doing and why it is doing it.
Vision makes your business attractive to
employees
People go to work for all sorts of different reasons.
Money often comes into it, as does paying bills. But
people also want something more, especially as our
economies grow in wealth and the basics are taken
care of. They want to do something meaningful,
something that gives them purpose. A clearly
articulated vision does not make your business
suddenly purposeful, but it makes sure that
employees figure out whether this is the sort of
employer that makes getting out of bed in the
morning a meaningful exercise.
The interesting thing about vision is that it also
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
brings a common purpose to the working of the
company. For example, BMW sells the idea of “the
ultimate driving experience” in its cars, whether it is
hawking a sleek roadster or a luxo-barge. This is not
just about marketing. The company has to create and
manufacture cars that deliver the ultimate driving
experience, or else the company’s vision would be
sold short by its execution.
In addition, the rise of social enterprise today is all
about companies doing meaningful things –
meaningful to the entrepreneur who wants to change
society, meaningful to the employee who wants to
see society changed, and meaningful to those who
are at the receiving end of all this change.
Vision makes your business aspirational
A vision is powerful when it causes people to get up
and do things, to change the world around them, to
achieve the objectives they set for themselves and
their organisation. Such an outlook can enable the
aspirations at the heart of a company to one day
become reality.
AUDIO INDUSTRY CASE STUDY
It was in the 1990s that Audio Partnership realised that although
British hi-fi companies were being beaten by the Far East when it came
to low-cost manufacture, they were at the top of the tree when it
came to audiophile cognoscenti around the world. Their reputation
was built largely on good design and excellent sound quality. Audio
Partnership took over struggling British brands such as Cambridge
Audio and Mordaunt-Short, strengthened their design prowess but
outsourced all manufacturing to China – possibly the first Western
audio company to do so. Plus, they built strong marketing campaigns
that enabled them to sell these British-designed products across the
world. Today, the company has revenues in excess of £25m, selling in
50 countries, and employing around 70 employees.
Stuart George, finance director of Audio Partnership, explained the
company’s vision process in this way. “Three to four times a year, the
board looks at each brand’s direction and ways to utilise technologies
across the brands. Plans emerge which encourage the business to
focus on a particular direction. Senior managers in the business then
debate the ideas from the board, through presentations and in-depth
analysis, in order to establish a response to the vision-casting. For
example, the market trend towards digital music has resulted in new
digital products from Audio Partnership, as well as a new digital
streaming service which represents a departure for the company which
only sold hardware in the past.”
Recently, the company announced its first piece of hardware
manufactured in Britain, an HDMI switcher. Clearly, its outsourcing
vision has not prevented it from defining a new direction when
appropriate.
19
LESSONS FROM HISTORY
VISION: HOW THE PAST CAN HELP
TODAY’S COMPANIES
Morgen Witzel examines some visionaries of the past and discusses what factors
allowed them to have such an impact.
In 1271 three Venetian traders, Niccolò Polo, his brother
Maffeo and his son Marco, left Venice to travel to the Far
East. Their purpose was to develop trade between Europe
and China. They knew the size and scale of the potential
trade – Niccolò and Maffeo had already travelled in Asia –
and saw a future in which trade between Europe and
China would become not only possible but highly
profitable. Put simply, they had a vision.
They were not the only ones. The late 13th century
saw the beginning of a feverish quest by Italian and other
merchants to open up trade routes to the east. Even
before the Polos returned home, the brothers Ugolino
and Vandino Vivaldi tried to reach India by sailing around
Africa by ship. Both were drowned in the attempt, but
many others came after them. By 1500 the first
Portuguese traders had reached India; 20 years later they
too were in China. Meanwhile British traders, seeking to
get to China by a north-eastern polar route, made
contact with the hitherto unknown realm of Russia and
opened up trade routes there too. Others, Christopher
Columbus, John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, sailed west and
established European contact with the New World.
Not all of the consequences of these voyages were
positive. Today, with hindsight, we are aware of the harsh
events that followed: colonialism, imperialism, slavery. But
in the days of the Polos and those that followed, these
things were not yet dreamed of. These men and others
like them had a vision of a world linked by commerce
and trade; a vision that today we would call globalisation.
There have always been visionaries in the world of
business. Some of them have pioneered new trade routes,
new markets, new products, new technologies. Some
have done great things, not just for their companies, but
also for their countries, And some have followed their
visions to disaster.
To boldly go
From the 13th to the 19th centuries, it was very often
business people who led the drive to explore, to go
beyond the horizon and discover what lay there. The
urge to go beyond what was already known, to be first
into new markets, is a constant theme through the
history of business in this period. Whether it was Thomas
Fyffe developing the market for bananas in England
through his contacts in the Canaries, or William Lever
going to the Solomon Islands to find high-grade palm oil
for his soaps, or Henry Gibbs developing the Chilean
nitrates industry, there seemed to be no boundary, no
Morgen Witzel is honorary senior fellow
at the University of Exeter Business
School.
[email protected]
20
limit to the imagination and inspiration of – at least some
– business leaders.
In the late 1890s, the British entrepreneur William Knox
D’Arcy had a theory that there was oil to be found in
Persia (the modern Iran). No one else believed him, but
D’Arcy, looking as much at the folklore and history of Iran
as the geological evidence, was convinced. He negotiated
an oil concession with the Shah of Persia and began
drilling. Absolutely nothing happened, and other oil
companies and prospectors began to ridicule D’Arcy.
Then, near the town of Masjid-i-Suliman, D’Arcy finally
struck oil, an immense deposit. This was the beginnings
of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, today known to us by
another, currently more controversial name: BP.
Sometimes, though, vision turned to nightmare. The
French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps was hailed as a
hero when he finally fulfilled a centuries old dream and
completed the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean
with the Red Sea. But his next attempt, a canal across the
Isthmus of Panama, was beyond his ability to manage. It
ended in disaster with thousands of workers dead, his
company bankrupt and his reputation ruined. Vision is a
double-edged sword.
With the passage of time, the visionary explorers in
business were more likely to be found in the realm of
science. Thomas Edison was one of the first of these. A
man for whom scientific exploration was an allconsuming passion, he turned out thousands of new
inventions and new products. Most failed. Few made
Edison himself much money. But some, such as the
electric light bulb, changed the nature of civilisation.
Earlier in the 19th century, Samuel Morse had patented
the first telegraph. Most thought of it as a device which
enable short-range communication only. Morse dismissed
this: ‘if I can make it go 10 miles’, he said, ‘I can make it
go around the world.’ Within a few years he had been
proved right.
The 20th century has seen the same vision in many
technology companies. Edwin Land, the founder of
Polaroid, built his own passion for scientific exploration
into the company’s values. Closer to the present, the
vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee enabled the internet, in the
form we know it today, to become reality. And the
human genome project was only possible because the
scientists behind had a vision of how their discoveries
could help millions of people. There is of course huge
controversy as to whether their discoveries might have
opened Pandora’s box. One person’s vision, it seems, is
another’s dystopia.
Doing things better
The name of Henry Robinson Towne is not much
discussed today, yet he was in part responsible for one of
the most important revolutions in management practice.
In 1886 he presented a paper to the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers in which he pointed out the very
icaew.com/fmfac
poor state of management in most factories and
workshops of the time. ‘The management of works is
unorganised’, he declared, ‘is almost without literature,
has no organ or medium for the interchange of
experience, and is without association or organisation of
any kind.’ He called for a more professional approach to
management, envisioning a day when management
would be regarded as a profession in its own right.
One engineer in the audience, Frederick Winslow
Taylor, took up that vision and made it his own. Over the
next 25 years Taylor and his colleagues developed what
they called ‘scientific management’. At the heart of
scientific management was the belief that all
management problems could be solved if they were
analysed scientifically. Taylor’s team went on to develop a
series of tools for analysis, most famously time and
motion study. Taylor truly believed that if management
were more scientific, the world would be a better place.
Companies would be more efficient and profitable, and
workers would be better paid and more prosperous.
Central to Taylor’s belief was the notion of fairness.
Scientific management should be fair to both the
company and its workers. Not all shared this belief. Some
employers used time and motion study to sweat more
labour out of their workers for the same pay. Some 20
years later, the Stakhanov system in the Soviet Union
used the methods of scientific management to set
impossible production targets for workers, then send
them to die in labour camps when they failed to reach
their targets. Once again, one man’s vision had become a
nightmare for others.
Revolutionary practitioners in management have always
struggled to get others to share their vision. During the
Industrial Revolution in Britain, the standard working day
was 14 hours. The mill owner Robert Owen discovered
that if he cut the working day to 11 hours, productivity
per worker over the course of each shift rose noticeably.
When he cut it to 10 hours it rose still further. He wrote
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
‘Revolutionary practitioners in management
have always struggled to get others to share
their vision’
to other mill owners advising them of this, but they
refused to listen. Owen became so disillusioned that he
converted to socialism and began espousing workers’
rights, helping to found the Trades Union Congress. The
Brazilian business leader Ricardo Semler experienced
similar scepticism in the 1980s when he described the
radical decentralisation of authority and leadership at his
own firm, Semco, and urged others to follow his
example. Very few did. Having a vision is perhaps the
easy part. Getting others to share it has always been far
harder.
New products, new markets
Other visionaries have seen how new products and new
markets could be developed which would transform not
just their own business, but society. In the first decade of
the twentieth century, most car manufacturers believed
that the car was a luxury product with no mass market
potential. Henry Ford thought differently. He believed
there was a demand for cheap cars that would provide
affordable transportation, and he was right. The Model T
Ford did not just make Ford’s company rich, it ushered in
the age of mass motoring and changed the face of
America and, ultimately, much of the rest of the world.
Steve Jobs’s visionary approach to putting sophisticated
technology into the hands of consumers everywhere has
similarly powered the success of Apple. A visionary
approach to product design has likewise been one of the
driving forces behind the success of Nokia for more than
a decade.
21
‘Visionaries have always existed, and always will. The
problem is that not all have the skill, or the will, to carry
their visions through’
In the 1850s, in virtually every corner of the world,
people did their shopping for food and household
necessities in small specialist shops. Goods were bought
over the counter, often without the customer having a
chance to inspect them. There were no fixed prices;
customer and merchant struck a bargain for each
purchase, and the advantage in most cases went to the
seller. A young French couple, Aristide and Marguerite
Boucicaut, had a vision of how they could do things
differently. They built the first true department store, Au
Bon Marché in Paris. Every household necessity could
now be bought under one roof. Prices were fixed and
customers could handle the goods, so they knew exactly
what they were getting. The Boucicauts went further,
introducing luxury goods at prices affordable to the rising
middle classes. Their vision of the ‘democratisation of
luxury’, as one observer called it, changed French society.
Victor Hugo and Émile Zola wrote novels about Au Bon
Marché. The concept was quickly imitated in Britain,
Germany, the US, even Hong Kong and Japan.
Where did they get their ideas? There is nothing in
their past experience to suggest where their insight came
from: Boucicaut was a shoemaker’s son, Marguerite was a
waitress. Was their inspiration simply innate genius?
Similarly, where did the carpenter Thomas Cook get the
idea of putting together the railways and the desire for
travel to form the world’s package tour company,
expanding from the English Midlands to around the
globe in thirty years? Julius Reuter was a professional
editor and translator with no knowledge of either
technology or journalism, yet he saw what no one else
FURTHER READING
Ian Donnachie, Robert Owen, East Linton, Tuckwell Press, 2000.
RM Lala, For the Love of India: The Life and Times of Jamsetji Tata, New
Delhi, Penguin, 2006.
Konosuke Matsushita, Not for Bread Alone, Tokyo, PHP Institute, 2004.
Anthony J Mayo, Nitin Nohria and Laura G Singleton, Paths to Power: How
Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership, Boston,
Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
VK McIlheny, Insisting on the Impossible, New York, Perseus, 1998.
Michael B Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department
Store, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994.
Michael Mol and Julian Birkinshaw, Giant Steps: Innovations in
Management That Change the Way You Work, London, FT-Prentice Hall,
2008.
Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,
New York, Alfred A Knopf, 2005.
Daniel A Wren, The Evolution of Management Thought, New York, John
Wiley & Sons, 1994.
Morgen Witzel, Management History: Text and Cases, London, Routledge,
2009.
22
did, the potential of the telegraph to create a
revolutionary form of business, the news agency. One
thing about vision is that no one knows where it comes
from. It can be found the unlikeliest places, and at the
strangest times.
The nation builders
Certainly few would have predicted that the young Indian
businessman Jamsetji N Tata, the son of a banker and
trader from Mumbai, would be so affected by his visit to
Britain in 1865. According to legend, Tata listened to a
lecture by the English philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who
said that those nations that controlled steel would come
in time to control gold as well; in other words, the steel
industry was an important source of wealth creation. He
also toured the textiles mills of northern England and saw
that here too, wealth was being created. A believer in a
strong and free India, Tata reasoned that wealth creation
could help India to reach political freedom.
Returning to India in 1868, Tata began setting up
businesses: first a textiles company, then a steel company
and others, including perhaps most famously the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Bombay, India’s first luxury hotel. If India
was going to attract foreign investors, Tata reasoned, it
needed to give them a first class hotel in which to stay.
Throughout the rest of his life, Tata was guided by a
single idea: service to India. By creating wealth, he was
helping to make India strong and free. And as well as
building businesses, he was a pioneer in providing fair
pay and employee benefits, not just in India but in the
world.
What is remarkable about Jamsetji Tata’s vision is that it
did not die with him. His successors at the head of the
Tata group have remained remarkably true to that vision,
and the company continues to put service to India, and
the other communities in which it works around the
world, at the heart of its values. Today, Tata Steel is one of
the world’s largest steel companies, and the Taj Mahal is
at the centre of a hotel group that covers five continents.
Vision is one of the things that has turned Tata into an
international giant. But it does not always happen. The
Cadbury company, too, once had a vision. So did Tate &
Lyle, which has just announced that it is selling its core
sugar business. Vision is a powerful thing, but only so
long as it can be kept alive. When it fades, companies
tend to fade too.
For better or for worse, visionary business leaders and
thinkers have changed the world. Their insights and
subsequent actions have helped to shape our civilisation.
Visionaries have always existed, and always will. The
problem is that not all have the skill, or the will, to carry
their visions through. Sometimes they fall flat on their
faces. And sometimes, even with the best of intentions,
they make things worse. Vision may be a necessary
ingredient of business, but it is not always a comfortable
one.
icaew.com/fmfac
WORKSHOPS
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR
VISION
Having accepted that having a vision can be beneficial to a business, Tony Powell looks
at how to go about developing one that is powerful and effective.
Developing your vision
Following my earlier piece on the importance of a vision
(on page 4), there are, in my view, two broad approaches
to developing a vision:
• the top team develops it, based on their understanding
of the needs and circumstances of the various
stakeholders, then communicates this to them; or
• the stakeholders are involved in the process from the
outset, with developments and changes communicated
as the vision develops.
the value it can deliver – though considerable preparation
may well be needed before the workshop takes place!
There are arguments for both approaches – and in some
cases sheer scale may be enough to deter a bottom-up
approach – though it has been applied in global
organisations with tens of thousands of employees.
If your top team truly is in touch with the staff and
other stakeholders then by all means develop the vision
and then communicate it afterwards, watching all the
time to make sure that the top team ‘walk the talk’. After
all, it will be seen first as the top team’s vision and your
people will be watching for evidence that you are not
living what you say. This approach can be very quick to
develop the statement, but it takes time and effort to
communicate it and embed it.
In contrast, involving stakeholders at all levels means
they are likely to ‘see their fingerprints’ on the vision
when it is finally agreed. It takes longer to develop but
should be quicker to communicate and use as a means of
galvanising the organisation behind you.
In either case, at the heart of the work is agreeing on
an effective workshop format that will allow for individual
contributions and lead to engagement throughout. The
approach described below is one that I have used on
several occasions in organisations ranging from ones
where you can get all the relevant people round one
table, to complex structures where many workshops are
needed to reach the various stakeholder groups. In all
cases responsibility for the final vision statement rests with
the top team – it is for them to agree and finalise and
then communicate the vision to all affected.
Finally, even when you have developed your vision,
even the best vision statements are not immune to
discontinuities – technological or otherwise. So keep
them under review to make sure that they are still
relevant to you and become living statements that can
evolve over time as circumstances change.
At the meeting
The heart of the meeting should be the actual work itself,
the approach is not specific to visioning and can be used
for problem solving or general brainstorming sessions.
To ensure everyone understands what is required, a
brief introduction should be given:
• a senior sponsor should cover the main points from any
pre-reading and take questions for clarification; and
• the facilitator for the meeting should explain the
process and timings that are to be followed during the
meeting.
Before the meeting
Circulate any relevant notes to the delegates. These could
include:
• the nature of visioning.
• the actual process being undertaken by the
organisation; and
• any background critical to the discussion.
Running a visioning workshop
This process can be run for numbers ranging from single
figures up to 16 to 20 with a single facilitator. If numbers
get larger than this then I would advise having additional
facilitators so delegates at the workshops are working
throughout in groups of up to 20 to help ensure that the
process runs smoothly and the pace is kept up. The
workshops described below take between an hour and an
hour and a half – so not a huge investment of time for
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
23
‘Further workshops are run as considered necessary
until the top team are satisfied that they have reached
sufficient numbers of the stakeholder groups’
For a group of 16 to 20, typical steps would be:
Step 1. Based on what they have just heard the delegates
are asked to project themselves forward for 10, 15
or 20 years and think about what their industry
might look like, and their part in it. 5-10 mins.
Step 2. Working individually, delegates write down their
ideas for what the future might look like, the
company’s role at that time and also the aspects
of the business that are critical to your company’s
role. 5-10 mins.
Step 3. Again working individually, come up with a vision
for how the world might look, the role of your
industry and your business in making it work that
way. 5 mins.
Step 4. Working in pairs, explain your vision to your
partner and then take suggestions to improve
both visions. After this step the pairs should split
so they are not in the same group again. 5 mins.
Step 5. Working in groups of four each person states their
vision adding further explanation if needed. The
members of the group then work together to
develop a vision statement for the group of four.
10 – 15 mins.
Step 6. Each group feeds back to the workshop as a
whole their vision statement, answers any
questions and then takes comments – which
could be suggestions for improvement or areas of
concern. 5 mins per group.
Step 7. Each group then has a final re-draft of their vision
statement which is collected by the facilitator
along with the supporting earlier working notes.
5 mins.
Box 1 PATTERN-BREAKING THINKING
The purpose of pattern-breaking thinking is to tap into the part of the
brain that comes up with unexpected ideas. There are four stages:
• priming the brain with a question to resolve;
• a period while your unconscious brain mulls over the question;
• the moment of inspiration when the idea comes to you; then finally
• taking the idea and working with it to check that it really works.
This is great if you have time, but typically in business we do not – which
is why structured analytical thinking is predominant. A shift in perspective
is needed, such as:
• a good and real challenge;
• an environment that corresponds to the mulling over phase – critically
one where anything goes and will not be ridiculed;
• a range of delegates with different backgrounds – the diversity will
promote multiple perspectives;
• a facilitator to help the process along and to guard the raw ideas from
being stamped on; and
• specific processes to break the normal patterns of thinking – eg how
might others in unrelated fields approach this?
24
Step 8. The sponsor closes the meeting, including
thanking the delegates, informing them of the
next steps and how they can continue to be
involved in the process going forward. 5 mins.
If time permits, this process could be extended to include
further steps to look at the vision from different
perspectives – eg what sort of vision statement would
people or organisations (real or fictional) that you admire
have come up with? Do these ideas contain anything
new that could help our vision be stronger or clearer or
more inspiring? Creativity in this context is linked to what
is called 'pattern-breaking thinking' – ie how to break out
of the old ways of thinking (see Box 1, below left).
After the meeting
The facilitator ensures that all materials have been
collected and writes up the meeting, to the extent agreed
with the top team.
Further workshops are run as considered necessary until
the top team are satisfied that they have reached
sufficient numbers of the stakeholder groups and they are
ready to consider the results of the workshops and work
on the final vision statement.
Finalising the vision
The top team’s work on finalising the vision would
normally take at least one full meeting and then space on
the management team meeting agenda as refinements
and suggestions emerge.
The structure of the first of these meetings could
mirror the structure noted above – but with the output
from the various workshops being the pre-meeting
reading. In my experience, this ‘final’ workshop with
the top team will typically take longer as the various
draft vision statements are raised and discussed.
However, once all are satisfied that they understand the
points that have been suggested from the workshops, it
is quite likely that a number of front runners will have
emerged as the basis for the vision statement. In this
case, getting to the first version of the vision may
involve not much more than ‘wordsmithing’ to
combine the key ideas into a single statement. At the
other extreme, it is quite possible that there are no
obvious choices – in which case running through a
process as described above should help to produce a
workable first version.
It is very unlikely that this version will be perfect. So
the next stage should be to show the suggested vision
statement to others in the business to get their
thoughts and ideas on how to improve it. In my view
there is no golden rule for this – it could be released to
the business layer by layer in some form of cascade, or
by convening cross-level groups of staff. The right
answer will depend on the culture and the norms for
your business.
icaew.com/fmfac
APPENDIX
EXAMPLES OF MISSION AND VISION
STATEMENTS
The following is a selection of vision and mission statements lifted from
corporate websites. We leave it up to you to decide whether they are successful
examples. Whatever you decide, they should spark some ideas.
Amazon.com
Mission: we seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric
company for three primary customer sets: consumer
customers, seller customers and developer customers.
Avon
Vision: to be the company that best understands and
satisfies the product, service and self-fulfilment needs of
women globally.
Bain and Company
Mission: to help our clients create such high levels of
economic value that together we set new standards of
excellence in our respective industries.
Coca-Cola Company
Mission:
Our Roadmap starts with our mission, which is enduring.
It declares our purpose as a company and serves as the
standard against which we weigh our actions and
decisions.
• To refresh the world...
• To inspire moments of optimism and happiness...
• To create value and make a difference.
Our Vision
Our vision serves as the framework for our Roadmap and
guides every aspect of our business by describing what
we need to accomplish in order to continue achieving
sustainable, quality growth.
• People: Be a great place to work where people are
inspired to be the best they can be.
• Portfolio: Bring to the world a portfolio of quality
beverage brands that anticipate and satisfy people’s
desires and needs.
• Partners: Nurture a winning network of customers and
suppliers, together we create mutual, enduring value.
• Planet: Be a responsible citizen that makes a difference
by helping build and support sustainable communities.
• Profit: Maximize long-term return to shareowners while
being mindful of our overall responsibilities.
• Productivity: Be a highly effective, lean and fast-moving
organization.
The Football Association
Vision: to be a world-class organisation with a winning
mentality
Google
Mission: to organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.
ICAEW
Vision: our institute and our members are acknowledged
in the UK and internationally for inspiring business
confidence.
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Vision: one firm – a powerhouse of a commercial
enterprise that does the right thing for our clients, our
people and our communities.
Santander
Vision: Towards a global bank
Santander wants to consolidate itself as a large
international financial group, which provides an
increasingly high return to its shareholders and meets all
the financial needs of its customers. In order to achieve
this, it combines a strong presence in local markets with
corporate policies and global capacities.
Starbucks
Mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit— one
person, one cup, and one neighbourhood at a time.
Virgin Atlantic
Mission: to grow a profitable business, where people love
to fly and where people love to work.
Visit Britain
Vision: to inspire the world to explore Britain.
Mission: to build the value of tourism to Britain, working
in partnership with the industry and nations and regions.
WWF
Mission: to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural
environment and to build a future in which humans live
in harmony with nature, by:
• conserving the world’s biological diversity
• ensuring that the use of renewable natural resources is
sustainable
• promoting the reduction of pollution and wasteful
consumption.
Fujitsu
Vision: through our constant pursuit of innovation, the
Fujitsu group aims to contribute to the creation of a
networked society that is rewarding and secure, bringing
about a prosperous future that fulfils the dreams of
people throughout the world.
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
25
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
BOOKS, JOURNAL ARTICLES AND MORE
Finance director's handbook
by G D Morris, Oxford, Elsevier in
association with CIMA Publishing,
2009. ISBN 9780750687010
Section 25.7 is entitled ‘Preparation
of a vision statement’.
Articles
‘Why mission statements matter’
by I Turner, Manager Update,
No.29, June 2004, pp.17-21.
ISSN: 14675765
Pressure on companies in different
parts of the world have led to a
convergence in governance
structures and strategic options. In
such an environment a focus on
business process and real options
theory may provide a useful
addition to more traditional theories
and techniques. The author reviews
evidence that suggests that
comprehensive vision statements
can lead to success for many
organisations.
Corporate strategy
by R Lynch, London, Financial
Times Prentice Hall, 2005. ISBN
0273701789
Section 10.2 is entitled ‘Developing
a strategic vision for the future’.
‘Influencing others’
by D Ladkin, Management Quarterly,
No.6, January 2000, pp.32-35
ISSN: 14675757
Knowing what needs to be done is
of little use unless you can persuade
AVAILABLE TO ICAEW MEMBERS
FROM THE INSTITUTE LIBRARY.
Books
Non-executive director's handbook
by G D Morris, Oxford, Elsevier in
association with CIMA publishing,
2008. ISBN 9780750684194
Section 7.4 is entitled ‘Developing
motions: determining a vision and
strategic options’.
the rest of your organisation to go
along with your wishes. This article
explores influencing skills as a key
business talent.
Special report
‘Strategic planning’, Finance and
Management special report, SR3,
May 2004.
icaew.com/index.cfm/route/126573
ICAEW members can obtain all of
these books and articles from the
Library and Information Service.
Books can be posted out free of
charge to your work or home
address. Journal articles can be
supplied for a small charge. Contact
the library on 020 7920 8620 or
[email protected]
Previous faculty special reports and
articles can be accessed free of
charge to faculty members at
icaew.com/fmsearch
Q&A
In the course of developing this report a number of pertinent questions were asked by the review
panel. We have used these to develop this questions and answers section.
Visit the Finance and Management Faculty’s LinkedIn group to have a look at some responses to
these queries, and also to add your own voice to the debate – www.linkedin.com
Question 1
There is consensus within the
report that people from
throughout an organisation should
be involved in defining its vision
and values. There is the risk that
top management may not agree
with the purpose of the business
as defined by the employees. How
can this be dealt with?
Question 2
Can inspiring visions really be
developed for all business? It is
relatively easy in charities and
some consumer goods companies,
but what about more mundane
businesses, banks or even tobacco
and arms companies?
26
Question 3
Can having different visions for
separate departments within one
organisation work?
important? People will all know
each other and it will be easier to
see if they are all working in the
same direction.
Question 4
Are there any differences with
regard to visions in different
business cultures throughout the
world – both in terms of what
visions are selected and how well
they work?
Question 7
Do you think there is a tipping
point when a vision becomes more
critical?
Question 5
Can a vision be too ambitious?
Question 6
Is it not the case that in a smaller
business a formal vision is less
Question 8
Do you have any tips on selling a
vision to a cynical workforce?
The PDF version of this special
report will contain the full
responses to these questions. The
PDF is downloadable at
icaew.com/specialreports
icaew.com/fmfac
SPECIAL REPORTS
PREVIOUS SPECIAL REPORTS
The faculty special reports summarised here were published over the past 15 months and, along with many
others, are available to members at icaew.com/specialreports. They comprise a range of in-depth reports on a
single topic, sometimes by a single author, sometimes by a range of experts. They are a vital source of expertise
on a variety of subjects.
Financial management
IFRSs – A BRIEFING FOR CEOs
As a chartered accountant in business you
need to keep up to date with the standards
that apply to financial reporting. You also
need to have a thorough understanding of
their business implications. This special report
provides exactly that, in a practical and
Entrepreneurial issues
STARTING A BUSINESS
This report aims to provide accountants with
a realistic and motivational overview of what
to consider when starting a business. The
report focuses on areas that accountants
may find more difficult, such as making
sales, or that may be overlooked, including
Financial management
INVESTMENT APPRAISAL
Investment appraisal is a key area in most
businesses. Decisions concerning capital
expenditure, coupled with strategic
planning, marketing and organisational
design are frequently critical in determining
the future success of the business. Based on
June 2010 (SR29)
accessible format. These concise and easy to
use briefing notes, produced by the
International Accounting Standards
Committee Foundation, provide summaries of
all the consolidated versions of International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) issued at
1 January 2009, in non-technical language.
March 2010 (SR28)
researching and testing ideas before
jumping in with detailed forecasts. It also
features several case studies of successful
finance professionals who have made their
ventures a success. They share their
experiences as well as the pitfalls they have
encountered along the way.
December 2009 (SR27)
a Guidance to Good Practice booklet issued
by the faculty in 1986, this report explains
the issues that finance departments should
consider and offers advice to managers on
how they can contribute effectively to
decision making and control during this
process.
October 2009 (SR26)
Company law
WRONGFUL TRADING
When trading is tough, companies can
become distressed. This report provides a
thorough examination of ‘wrongful trading’,
as well is its implications for directors. It offers
a rundown of the legal aspects, including the
roles and responsibilities of directors, and
provides some practical examples of how
cases have been interpreted in court. Also
covered is how to monitor performance in a
business, to support decision-making and
actions if trading becomes distressed. This
report does not represent legal advice but
offers some key points to be considered.
June 2009 (SR25)
Managing people
PSYCHOMETRICS IN BUSINESS
In business, people are often regarded as the
most important asset. How then, do we
ensure we have the best people for our
business? This report, in association with
international business psychology consultancy
OPP, was written by Gareth English and Lucy
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT SPECIAL REPORT September 2010
McGee. They discuss the tools and
applications for psychometric testing, and
how this information can help in business.
Gaining an insight into someone’s personality
can take time but psychometrics can provide
organisations with the human equivalent of
due diligence.
27
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