Business literatures often suggest the need for any organization to have a vision—an articulation of an end-state for their organizations often in the form of a corporate vision statement follow by missions and values statement. Many believe that this is important for any organization to have an articulated vision statement. Experience from the field suggested that visioning exercise is tricky and often executives are neither satisfied with the outcome, nor the visioning exercise or process. Vision is not only limited in use to today’s dynamic business landscape, it is sometimes harmful when executives beginning to confuse vision with strategy. Many businesses today are operating in times of unprecedented competitive pressure and discontinuous change, complacency is fatal. Using visions to drive strategies can often be dangerous.

Vision is commonly defined as a statement of ambition that defines success and establishes the ground rules by which success will be achieved for a particular organization; the articulation of management’s intent regarding the future of an organization, expressed in often highly aspirational terms. While the process is frequently found to be effective in terms of its ability to generate consensus and commitment to among the management team, it has little relevancy to how a company chose to compete in a marketplace and most importantly how to differentiate itself. In fact, it offers little or no help at all in terms of helping a company to rationalize how to drive for industry innovation and leadership.

Strategic planning sessions often focus on crafting the company vision, then mission and goals etc. and answering questions such as who we are, what we do and what we want to be etc. And from there you craft a strategy and create a roadmap to get there. Simple and straightforward. Many consultants are overly eager to offer to help companies to write their mission statements that are modeled after great companies. And when manages hear about vision, often they refer to it as strategy. While the value of having some form of statement of purpose or values in a form of visions or mission statements is obvious, but it should never be mistaken as having a strategy. Strategy is not only about vision; companies are spending too much time thinking and articulating them. Interestingly, if you look at how Marvin Bower, the long time managing director of McKinsey and Company, talked about the fourteen processes for which a management system for a business can be fashioned. He talked of fashioning the fourteen components into a company management system is the job of every CEO, and that is “strategy”. And they include setting objectives, developing competitive strategy, establishing goals, designing organization structures and setting standards etc. Surprisingly, among all fourteen processes, the word ‘vision’ was not mentioned once.

In fact companies can make significantly greater progress and learn from a series of incremental commitments rather than through top-down strategic visions. To achieve strategic goals companies should put less energy on visioning but more effort on market learning. The most effective strategies of major corporations tend to emerge step-by-step from an iterative process in which the organization probes the future, build different scenarios, experiment differentiation among competing companies. I believe the problem all comes back to a lack of understanding of what is strategy. Strategy making is a complex process that involves high uncertainty in customer, technology and the marketplace, interactions between individuals with different motives and objectives, and constraining or controlling forces of various sets of environments. Business unit’s managers anticipate and respond to product market forces in the context of job definition and career stakes, while at the same time, working for the realization of their personal beliefs and visions. Senior corporate managers attempt to guide the actions of middle managers to reflect their strategic intents and attain the purposes of their corporations, while dealing with constraints imposed by the firm’s environment and external constituents. Their actions define the organization context in which middle or business unites managers identify opportunities and solve problems in the product market and respective channels, but their knowledge of the market depends to a significant degree on what those middle-level managers report. Strategy making is an iterated process of market leaning, opportunity discoveries and resource allocation.