Vision statements instilling values will motivate India Inc

Most self-improvement literature would emphasise the need to have a challenging personal vision and goal. All management literature would talk

about strategic planning to create vision, mission and goals as a tool for reaching the corporate dream. Do CEOs and entrepreneurs really consider creating, communicating and operationalising vision and values important?

Bain & Company launched a multi-year research project in 1993 to gather facts about the use and performance of management tools. Their objective was to help inform managers about the tools available to them and provide them with the information they need in order to identify, select, implement and integrate the right tools to improve their company’s performance.

Over the past 14 years, they have completed 11 surveys, assembling a database that now includes 8,504 respondents from more than 70 countries in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. On a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is 100% satisfaction, vision and mission in this survey from 1993 to 2007 scored around 4 showing high level of satisfaction.

Another study that emphasised the importance of vision and values was by authors James C Collins and Jerry I Porras. They studied the differences between companies that are merely good and those that have established long-standing reputations for excellence and wrote the book Built to Last. They found that great companies had developed a core ideology and an envisioned future.

According to the authors, this critical core ideology expresses both what we stand for and why we exist. It is not composed or just nicely written but is discovered by looking inside the company to find what is already there.
Now let us look at the Indian canvas.

How far and to what extent Indian organisations feel the need for creating and operationalising vision and values? We reached out to a large number of people from large, medium and small organisations through a survey. So both the Bain study and Built to Last emphasise the importance of vision, values and aligning people around it. Indian organisations, however, have still not utilised the power of this tool effectively, our study shows.


In the study, we examined the websites of 100 organisations and reached out to 500 people from different organisations asking if they are aware of a vision statement . Mostly the people we contacted were in middle to senior management, considering that, if there is some talk about vision, they would know about it.

What comes out very clearly is that Indian CEOs and managers do not use the power of a well-stated vision and values to energise and motivate the workplace. Many organisations do not talk, even on their websites, about vision and values.

Interestingly, within the group of companies covered in our survey, the younger companies seem to have a well defined vision while the older companies do not. For example, Hero Honda motors do not talk about a vision statement, but their other organisations like Easy Bill and Hero ITES talk about vision and values.

Also, a large number of new age organisations—software , BPOs, KPOs—seem to talk more about vision and values than the brick and motor companies (Tata is an exception). We need to keep in mind that this study was to see if leaders use this as a tool to motivate people or integrate vision and values into the system.

I am sure leaders of our great companies would have a vision but what we are saying is that they fail to communicate that effectively. Airtel , we found, as another organisation that constantly communicated vision and values to the employees.

There is an interesting confusion between vision and mission statements that many organisations face. A mission statement tells you what the company is now. It concentrates on the present; it defines the customer(s), critical processes and it informs you about the desired level of performance and vision statement outlines what a company wants to be.

It concentrates on the future; it is a source of inspiration ; it provides clear decision-making criteria. Many organisations have given a goal as a vision statement. May be, in the tough times they confront, more and more CEOs of Indian organisations need to use this simple tool to ignite the organisational souls and engage employees to a meaningful purpose.

From:7 Nov 2008, 0441 hrs IST, Sathosh Babu, THE ECONOMIC TIMES
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