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Any casual tour of business or organization Web sites will expose you to the
range of forms that mission and vision statements can take. To reiterate, mission
statements are longer than vision statements, often because they convey the
organizations core values. Mission statements answer the questions of “Who are

we?” and “What does our organization value?” Vision statements typically take the
form of relatively brief, future-oriented statements—vision statements answer the
question “Where is this organization going?” Increasingly, organizations also add
a values statement which either reaffirms or states outright the organization’s values
that might not be evident in the mission or vision statements.
Roles Played by Mission and Vision
Mission and vision statements play three critical roles: (1) communicate the
purpose of the organization to stakeholders, (2) inform strategy development, and (3)
develop the measurable goals and objectives by which to gauge the success of the
organization’s strategy. These interdependent, cascading roles, and the relationships
among them, are summarized in the figure.

First, mission and vision provide a vehicle for communicating an
organization’s purpose and values to all key stakeholders. Stakeholders are those key
parties who have some influence over the organization or stake in its future. You will
learn more about stakeholders and stakeholder analysis later in this chapter; however,
for now, suffice it to say that some key stakeholders are employees, customers,
investors, suppliers, and institutions such as governments. Typically, these statements
would be widely circulated and discussed often so that their meaning is widely
understood, shared, and internalized. The better employees understand an
organization’s purpose, through its mission and vision, the better able they will be to
understand the strategy and its implementation.
Second, mission and vision create a target for strategy development. That is,
one criterion of a good strategy is how well it helps the firm achieve its mission and
vision. To better understand the relationship among mission, vision, and strategy, it is
sometimes helpful to visualize them collectively as a funnel. At the broadest part of
the funnel, you find the inputs into the mission statement. Toward the narrower part
of the funnel, you find the vision statement, which has distilled down the mission in a
way that it can guide the development of the strategy. In the narrowest part of the

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