Page 31 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Building a Unifying Vision 21

unique reason for existence. For the World Bank, the mission is to provide
financial and technical support for economic development in disadvan-
taged parts of the world. A network of hospitals might have the mission of
“providing a full range of health-care services to a target market,” or a
manufacturing concern in business might be “to develop, produce, sell, and
service certain products for small and medium-sized enterprises.” These
kinds of statements define the business they are in and can be accessed in
their legal articles of incorporation, founder’s early statements, or discus-
sions with board members and senior leaders.
Values too are enduring, though they may respond a bit to the times.
These are the ground rules for how the enterprise and its people should
work to get things done. Values tend to be more personal; they are the ideal
operating guidelines for personal behavior that individuals are supposed
to follow as they do their work. At the World Bank, for exam- ple, a code of
conduct called “living the values” outlines specific ways that staff should
interact with colleagues, clients, civil society, and local communities, and
how managers should ideally behave toward their people.
A vision, on the other hand, is a picture or snapshot of what the or-
ganization or your unit wants to accomplish over the next several years or
where its efforts are pointing it in the long term. The vision conveys a
direction—not how to get there (that’s strategy), nor the immediate mea-
surable goals that drive performance, but a context within which specific
strategies and goals can be framed. For the World Bank, the shift to freeing
the world from poverty represented a material change from the organiza-
tion’s previous direction of facilitating post–World War II reconstruction
and supporting Cold War–era democratic capitalism. And at the unit level,
Dennis Whittle’s vision to leverage ideas from around the world that could
reduce poverty was a dramatic change from the strategy team’s previous
reliance on its own experts. (Table 1-1 shows how vision is different from
mission and values.)
To be sure, different leaders approach the term “vision” differently. See
the box “The elements of a vision” for another classic definition of how
these ideas fit together and what makes an effective vision.