From the experts: Why vision and purpose are more than cliches

If you think that concepts like vision and purpose are just for big organisations, think again. The unified goal of creating something more is what binds and drives companies of any size, like psychic glue that brings people together in a common direction.

SmartCompany Plus explores advice from nine entrepreneurs and business leaders on exactly why vision and purpose are more than cliches.

“[When I talk about] embedding purpose, I’m not talking about your mission, which is what you do every day, or your vision, which is where you are headed,” says strategist Ashley M. Grice in her TED Talk ‘The Power of Purpose in Business’.

“Both mission and vision are important corporate drivers, but they play a different role in purpose. And mission and vision will change with changes in leadership, corporate contacts, competitive landscape, merger and acquisition. They are important, but they are also temporal. In my experience, they often have a time horizon of, say, three to five years.

“But purpose is your ‘why’. It is found at the intersection of who you are at your very best and the role in the world that you are meant to play. It comes from your ethos. It is married to your aspiration, and because it is ethotic, it is also timeless.”

“My company is small; I’m not sure all this vision talk applies to us. We’re not HP, IBM, J&J, or McKinsey. We’re just trying to make a go of it,” notes Jim Collins in his classic on management Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0.

“Good point. But remember, each of the above companies once was a small, struggling enterprise, and, in every case, the vision was laid in place when the company was still small. It’s not that these companies are big and therefore have the luxury of vision; it’s that vision helped them become great in the first place. Vision precedes greatness, not vice versa. A caveat: we don’t mean to imply that vision is necessary only if you want to become big. We understand that you might want to remain a small company. If that’s what you want, then you still need a vision. Why? Because if you’re good, there will be opportunities to grow. The only way to remain small (if that’s what you want) is to have a clear vision about what you want the company to be in the first place.”

“Patagonia’s purpose is to produce less clothing, to make it last longer, and to offset its price socially and environmentally,” explains Paul Jarvis in Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business.

“Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, believes that much of his company’s success is due to being a ‘responsible’ company. A shared set of values around environmental stewardship and sustainability guides how they do business, from how they hire and train employees to why they’ve had on-site day care since they started, to why they co-founded the charity 1% for the Planet. This approach may run counter to how a lot of clothing companies operate, but … because this purpose resonates with Patagonia’s audience, they’re able to charge a higher price for their responsible clothing.”

“It’s hard to imagine how your employees can perform if they don’t understand your company’s purpose,” write Sally Blount and Paul Leinwand in Harvard Business Review.

“How can they come to work every day ready to further the business if they don’t know what your organization is trying to accomplish and how their jobs support those goals? The clearer you can be about what value your company creates and for whom, the greater your ability to inspire your workers. And the more you align the right talent, operating model, and financial resources to support your purpose, the better able employees will be to deliver on it.

“IKEA, the world’s largest furniture manufacturer and retailer, has a clear message about the value it offers. It promises ‘to create a better everyday life for the many people’ — as distinct from the affluent few — by ‘offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them’. The company makes good on that promise by developing keen insights into the ways customers live, translating those insights into products, designing attractive furniture that ships and sells in flat boxes, and using a highly efficient, scalable manufacturing and supply chain.”

“I walk through life constantly curious about how things work,” explains Randy Grieser in The Ordinary Leader: 10 Key Insights for Building and Leading a Thriving Organization.

“I read every day — newspapers, magazines, blogs; I read with an eye for upcoming trends. I look for unique stories of businesses and organisations that are doing things I have never thought of before. I encourage this and teach the value of it to our employees as well.”

“What I mean by passion is not just that you have something you care about,” says Angela Duckworth in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

“What I mean is that you care about that same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way. You are not capricious. Each day, you wake up thinking of the questions you fell asleep thinking about. You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, ever eager to take even the smallest step forward than to take a step to the side, toward some other destination. At the extreme, one might call your focus obsessive. Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy. You have your priorities in order.”

“A vision needs two qualities,” says George Barbee, author of 63 Innovation Nuggets for Aspiring Innovators, writing in strategy+business. “First, it has to be a winning concept. People like to be associated with a winner, a long-term success. Second, it has to be so clear and memorable — so simple, really — that people will never be able to leave it behind them. Simple doesn’t mean being simplistic. It means getting to the heart of the matter, in a way that enables you to draw in everyone around you to master the complexities together.

“In the 1980s, General Electric CEO Jack Welch came up with a great winning concept when he coined the word boundaryless to describe the antidote to the common problem of silos. At GE, managers’ behavior was oriented to their function, division, or country … Welch didn’t use the familiar language of silos or talk about working together. The word he used instead was difficult to pronounce. That in itself brought attention to its importance. And the fact that the CEO kept repeating boundaryless didn’t hurt. 

“Businesses everywhere still talk about breaking down silos and building cross-functional teams. But the word boundaryless outshines all that. It represents a simple communication triumph that has never gotten stale. Jack Welch coined the word, and it became part of GE’s culture. You don’t have to coin your own word, but if you can find a simple, clear concept at the heart of your strategy, and if you can get others to appreciate it, then you’re on your way to creating nuggets of your own.”

“The most important part of ‘performance with purpose’ is the use of the word ‘with’,” explained former PepsiCo chair and CEO Indra Nooyi in this 2010 interview about the company’s corporate mission with Boston Consulting Group.

“It’s performance with purpose, not performance and purpose, or performance or purpose. Unless you focus on purpose, you cannot deliver performance. And unless you deliver performance, you can’t fund purpose. 

“This is a very closely linked ecosystem. If we do not transform our portfolio, we cannot sustain performance. If we do not become greener than we are today, young people are not going to come to work for us.”