Mission or Vision?

What is more important and when to use either of them?

"We have to get organized." Is what you often hear for a club, a non-profit organization or another institute of which the business is not all too clear. They want to achieve something, but how and what. There is often an ideology ...

The management of a business is not that difficult, but most of all large companies are often stuck in organizational issues and politics that have little to do with the business.
Hospitals are exemplary for this; institutes with a myriad of stakeholders and hard to manage specialists. And why? Because there is no vision (1) and management of complex companies often doesn't understand the difference between the business and the organization.

When a surgeon operates a patient, he or she is directly involved in the business. If the surgeon who is sought to do the operation gets ill, he needs to be replaced by another to foster availability. That replacement and everything involved is organization. These two appear to be two different worlds but they operate under the same laws of productivity. In the business productivity is directly to do with (external) clients. An organization is a collection or network of individual companies each with their own business. The only difference: they operate under the same roof.

Management is difficult, because many managers fail to understand these communicating vessels. Another reason why management is difficult, is because managers fail to develop or communicate a vision.

Although business and organization are communicating vessels, the business is leading. Everything depends on your business choices. The organization is at most a constraint, but never leading.
But there must be a direction. And a direction can only come from the business; what do you want to achieve, which clients, products, etc.

A manager or leader can develop a vision at any business area; it doesn't need to be for the whole company. But when it is developed at a lower (organizational) level, the parts must fit in the complete picture.

An example of a vision in a hospital is about the role of radiology. This is only a part of the business, but more and more important.

Radiology is basically about interpreting scans and for some parts about intervention too. A question for a vision is how and when radiology is introduced to the client; as soon as possible or more at the end... Without going into details, this depends on a broader vision of technological development and the development of skills and specialization.

When I search on the internet for "our mission" the results offer a few non-profit organizations. Non-profit organizations are typically organization in search for a business. That is when a mission is more important than a vision. A mission is for evangelists who have a certain ideology based on (the belief) of their resources. They bother less about a vision because they want to shape the world not profit from it. That's why they are ideological based.

Much of these ideology based organization as far from the reality. In fact they don't care, because they have a mission.

A vision on the other hand is important for a business and management need to develop it to safeguard its role in turbulent markets that continuously change.

Strangely enough I also found Microsoft's' mission on (Google's) search page one; their mission: "to help people and businesses around the world realize their full potential."

That sounds like evangelism. Check for yourself whether you think that is still appropriate.

Visions are private. They shouldn't be communicated to visitors on the internet. They are for internal purposes only.

H.J.B.

2008 Hans Bool