Vision & Mission Statement
Jul 7th, 2007 by William Jones
Vision Statement
The Time Thoughts website states that a vision statement “describe your own unique vision of what an ideal experience in each of your life areas would be like…and tend to focus on the distant future looking forward five to ten years. They represent an ideal outcome.” They go on to define mission statement as being “based on your current situation and what you need to focus on in the next one to three years to move you closer to your long-term vision.” Time Thoughts also distinguishes between a vision and a mission statement by declaring that vision statements are generally passive and focus mostly on what you want to experience, while mission statements are active by focusing on your actions, behaviors, habits and character. The two statements support each other by outlining the ideal outcome and the actions by which to get there. Now, let’s look at a few mission statements.
Mission Statement
Being one of the dominant players in the search engine arena, their website states that “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
A previous employer of mine, Nextel Partners mission is “to provide high quality, integrated wireless service that maximizes customer and investor value.” To achieve this mission, the company heavily relies on five guiding principles:
• Strive for 100% partner satisfaction.
• Strive for 100% customer satisfaction.
• Achieve targeted revenue growth with a low cost structure.
• Achieve win-win results through the power of teamwork.
• Work smart while remaining humble.
The last example is from the fictional movie Star Trek. At the beginning of each episode, Captain Kirk told viewers the five year mission of the starship Enterprise: “To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
As you can see, vision and mission statements are important to help determine your long-range objective and the actions you will take to accomplish the objectives.
