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ground, tend to be longer than vision statements, but you should aim to write no more
than a page. Your words can be as long as you would like them to be, but a shorter
vision statement may be easier to remember.
Communications
The communications step of the mission and vision statements development
process is analogous to the “L” (leading) part of the P-O-L-C framework.
Communicate often: Internal communications are the key to success. People need to
see the vision, identify with it, and know that leadership is serious about it.
Managers must evaluate both the need and the necessary tactics for
persuasively communicating a strategy in four different
[2]
directions: upward, downward, across, and outward.
Communicating Upward
Increasingly, firms rely on bottom-up innovation processes that encourage and
empower middle-level and division managers to take ownership of mission and
vision and propose new strategies to achieve them. Communicating upward means
that someone or some group has championed the vision internally and has succeeded
in convincing top management of its merits and feasibility.
Communicating Downward
Communicating downward means enlisting the support of the people who’ll be
needed to implement the mission and vision. Too often, managers undertake this task
only after a strategy has been set in stone, thereby running the risk of undermining
both the strategy and any culture of trust and cooperation that may have existed
previously. Starting on the communication process early is the best way to identify
and surmount obstacles, and it usually ensures that a management team is working
with a common purpose and intensity that will be important when it’s time to
implement the strategy.
Communicating Across and Outward
The need to communicate across and outward reflects the fact that realization
of a mission and vision will probably require cooperation from other units of the firm
(across) and from key external stakeholders, such as material and capital providers,
complementors, and customers (outward). Internally, for example, the strategy may
call for raw materials or services to be provided by another subsidiary; perhaps it
depends on sales leads from other units. The software company Emageon couldn’t
get hospitals to adopt the leading-edge visualization software that was produced and
sold by one subsidiary until its hardware division started cross-selling the software as
well. This internal coordination required a champion from the software side to
convince managers on the hardware side of the need and benefits of working
together.
Application
It is the successful execution of this step—actually using the mission and
vision statements—that eludes most organizations. “Yes, it is inconvenient and
expensive to move beyond the easy path” and make decisions that support the
mission statement, says Lila Booth, a Philadelphia-area consultant who is on the
faculty of the Wharton Small Business Development Center. But ditching mission for
expediency “is short-term thinking,” she adds, “which can be costly in the end, costly
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