Outline – Vision, Mission, Strategy

I’ve been thinking about Vision, Mission, and Strategy — for both individuals and organizations.

I’m also trying to figure out how to increase the quality of the stuff I put on this blog while maintaining low cost (time and pain) of writing.

Today’s experiment: modularize planning. I’ll make a little outline / wish list of stuff that in a time-abundant world I’d like to write about Vision. This may make it easier for me to write pieces in short daily writing sprints that ultimately fit together into a coherent whole.

Components:

• Motivation. Create a portal to great missions.
• What is a mission?
  • What does it do when it’s successful? The primary thing is that it orients. Every time a person picks it up and thinks about it, they’re reoriented back to the company’s perspective on the world — what’s good and how we’re going to get it.
  • This means that it’s contiguous with your strategy — a perspective on where the critical levers lie — and all your operational plans. This starts to give an idea as to why it’s rare for an organization to have a great mission.
• Why does it matter?
  • If a company doesn’t have a good vision, people have nothing to serve but themselves.
• What are the criteria of a good vision? A good vision satisfies four criteria: it’s inspiring, guiding, accurate, and it’s actually used.
• Examples of good and bad visions.
  • Elon Musk and his companies (as described by Tim Urban)
  • Walt Disney’s
  • Some friends of mine
• How do you create a good vision?
• How do you evaluate whether the vision you have is good enough?
• Some missions look great to some people and bad to other people.
• Vision leads into strategy.
• A question to ask when formulating strategy: what’s the limiting factor and is there chain-link logic?
• Good strategy is design.