Vision and Mission
Vision & Mission
What Are Vision and Mission?
- Mission = why we exist, vision = where we are headed
- An organization’s compass and its source of meaning
- Meaningless if it stays a wall slogan
Whether a vision and mission actually work shows up in the meeting room. When a new-business proposal comes in, an organization that asks only 'Will it make money?' and one that first asks 'Is this what we said we would do?' end up with completely different business portfolios three years later. Once direction is set, the basis for decisions shifts from this quarter’s numbers to 'who we are trying to become,' and above all you gain a reason to turn down what you will not do. The speed at which the front line decides for itself, without leaders stepping in every time, is what vision and mission actually change.
The two are different in nature. A mission has no deadline and rarely changes; it is the reason you exist. A vision is a destination with a deadline. In practice the vision period is often set at 3 to 5 years, and some organizations also set a separate bold goal of 10 years or more, like the BHAG Collins described. Add core values, which define 'how we will act,' and the set is complete. One boundary deserves attention: a vision is not a revenue target. 'KRW 1 trillion (≈ US$748,167,000) in revenue by 2030' is only an outcome metric, not a picture, and members cannot imagine their own place in it. And the statement must be short enough that someone can hear it once and repeat it to others.
The most common failure we see is treating this as a 'slogan-writing project'. Hand it to an outside firm, take delivery of a polished sentence, hang it in a frame, and with no link to hiring, evaluation, or budget allocation nobody remembers it three months later. New-business decisions then come down to the CEO’s mood that day, and each department runs on its own priorities until resources split. Rewriting the vision every time leadership changes is just as risky. When a new slogan appears every two years, employees roll their eyes ('here we go again'), and when real change does come, no one moves.
Yeonmi SongSpecialist instructor and coach in relationship management, resilience, and self-leadership
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”It became established in modern management and strategy theory as a core concept for defining an organization’s purpose and direction.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A, an industrial parts manufacturer with 320 employees and annual revenue of KRW 48 (≈ US$1) billion, was in the second year of a second-generation leadership succession and was weighing three new businesses at once. Sales wanted to go overseas, while production argued for expanding existing lines. Six months passed with no decision, and in the meantime seven people at manager level or above left the company.
- The CEO confessed to the head of corporate planning, "Honestly, I can’t answer in one sentence why our company exists." Of 287 anonymous survey respondents, only 31% said they knew the company’s direction.
- Nine executives went into a two-day retreat, and when the head of production asked, "If KRW 100 billion (≈ US$74,816,700) in revenue is the vision, are we a failure in a year we hit KRW 99.9 billion (≈ US$74,741,900)?", they changed course. Instead of setting a number, they chose to describe 'who we want to be in five years' in words.
- They circulated three draft missions to 24 team leaders and separately interviewed 12 shop-floor foremen. The sentence "We don’t make parts; we make equipment that never stops" got the most votes and became the final version.
- They described the vision as a state of affairs in 2029 and also wrote down three 'things we will not do'. One new-business proposal that failed this test was formally withdrawn at the investment review stage.
- The head of business planning added a field to the quarterly business plan review form: 'How does this proposal connect to our mission?' For a year, the CEO held to one rule: if this field is empty, the proposal is returned unread.
- In the same survey a year later, awareness of direction rose from 31% to 74% and voluntary turnover fell from 14% to 8%. New-business proposals, which had been piling up without any filter, dropped from 27 to 11 a year, while the rate at which they moved to execution doubled.