Shaping your purpose: How to define mission and vision?
Do you think that someone can take a plane and after boarding the plane decide on his destination?
Or someone gets into an engineering school and realises that he wanted to go to medical school?
These things happen because the journey started without enough homework or preparation.
If you take efforts to decide on your Mission and Vision for your business and align these to your goals, these things will not happen.
"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion."
Without vision & mission, you may get to the top of the ladder and then realise that the ladder was leaning against the wrong building.
Many people get confused about vision and mission, as the lines get blurred at times.
The vision statement focuses on tomorrow and what the organization wants to become.
The mission statement focuses on today and what the organization does.
While companies commonly use mission and vision statements interchangeably, it’s important to have both.
Let’s dive in and see how to write a mission statement.
1. Mission
Why do you exist? Whom do you serve?
Your mission statement is about you, your business and your ideas.
A great mission statement will define a business and its purpose in less than 30 seconds.
The mission statement defines what an organization does and what the organization is striving to accomplish.
"When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it."
Let’s look at some examples –
Amazon's Mission statement:
“We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.”
McDonald’s Mission –
“To be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience”
Ikea’s Mission –
“To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low, that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”
So how do we write this – think about these 3 questions -
- WHAT: What do you do? What is your big idea? What do you want to be known for?
If you are in the business of making a product, let’s say some healthy food business and you may want your customers to eat healthy, nutritious food.
- WHO: Who do you serve? For whom do you do it? Depending on your product, you need to understand who are your customers. So for a healthy food business, it may be directed towards people who are either obese or have some sort of disease, blood pressure, diabetes and you are giving them more food choices.
- PURPOSE: Why do you do it? What are the benefits of your services /products?
Let’s try to write this in one sentence – In this example, you are trying to make people healthier and happier. So try to fill in the blanks with answers from the above questions. So You can write your mission statement like –
“To provide healthy food alternatives to people who are sick, so that they can be healthier and happier.”
Now make it bigger and better.
“To provide healthy food to people to make them healthier and happier.”
Read it again, rewrite it, till the time you believe that this resonates with what you are doing.
2. Vision
Vision is all about your destination.
Where do you want to reach? or What do you want to become? This is about future. Vision can be qualitative or quantitative. You need a very, exceptional clear vision.
And to me, a vision is something that you can say in one sentence. The fewer the words the better.
It can also be your BHAG - big hairy audacious goal, which may never happen.
Amazon's Vision statement: To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
Ikea’s vision - “To create a better everyday life for the many people”.
A vision transforms the organization. It provides a picture of what could be. It is a catalyst that can impel an organization to move toward that dream.
As dreams come true or realities change, visions change.
It is a goal of the highest order.
For this to happen, the direction needs to be as clear as possible. Think about it -
- Where do you ultimately want your business to get to?
- What would you include or additionally achieve, if there were no obstacles?
- What do you want your business to be doing in next 10 years?
For our last eg. For healthy food, the vision can be –
“To be the best or number one health food company in the world”
You can have a monetary vision as well – To have the company with Rs 1000 crore revenue.
Keep it simple in any case!
Thank you for reading this article.