Implementing the Corporate Mission

43 valuable management tool for each company, regardless of its size and status. In the next step, the CMS must be generated. The "song to sing" is the mission and the "song sheet" is the mission statement. The purpose of the mission is to provide direction. Everyone in the company should "face in the same direction at the same time". This chapter outlines a way to generate the CMS and gives recommendations for "a good song". The generation process is time consuming and requires the employment of a substantial amount of the company's resources in order "to bring about [...] organizational development". Information must be collected or -- if unavailable -- generated. Initially, top management needs to assess its willingness to commit the required resources. Once management is determined to create its own CMS, a thorough analysis of the environment is necessary to establish and assess the background that constrains the future mission. The results of this analysis will influence the design of the CMS. With the knowledge of the results, the actual design process can be started. [...]

30 environment, the company needs perhaps a leader with the ability to manage the financial side, marketing, or other functional parts. The environment does not force the company to both change quickly and look for new ways of doing business. In fact, this is necessary in a highly turbulent environment. The company has to adapt to the rapidly changing environment as quickly as possible. The future is nearly unpredictable. Therefore, the CEO especially needs to be able to "see beyond the obvious" and to produce a mental image of the future and the necessary adaptations. The CEO should not just extrapolate past experiences. As Collins and Porras (1991) stated, it is not necessarily the CEO who needs to be the visionary leader. In fact, all managers on the upper management level (maybe even on the middle management level) can be the visionary leader of the company. Nevertheless, the more power the visionary leader has, the more effectively she/he can implement the vision. A vision is usually only precise in the short run. In the long run, the vision is more indistinct and not as exactly formulated. The visionary leader has just a mental image of the future, it is a picture in his mind. The next step, after developing a vision, is to implement this vision. The employees should understand and accept the vision. Only then, in fact, is the company going to be visionary. With this definition and description it becomes more apparent that vision might be part of the CMS, but not necessarily. Though vision is more related and concerned with strategy, it can include the "soft" elements of the CMS as values and philosophy. A vision tries to motivate management and employees and it can bring life into the "hard" and logical strategic part of the CMS. Vision is not an alternative concept to the mission, but rather an optional and complimentary one. Vision is clearly oriented towards the future, whereas the CMS is more focused on the present. Campbell and Yeung (1991a) identified two major weaknesses of vision in comparison to the CMS-concept: 1. Once a vision is achieved it loses its power to motivate and endure. The company might lose its direction. This is the same reason, why a goal should not be included in the mission statement. Though the CMS must be evaluated and adjusted from time to time because of changing environmental circumstances and priorities, it is a more timeless concept that should [...]

29 personal characteristic to the whole corporation. In fact, the vision becomes part of the corporate culture. A mission statement can express this vision of the company. However, this is not necessary. Sashkin (1986) is an exponent for the view that being visionary is a personal characteristic of the manager. He identified three basic elements that a vision has to consider. First, the vision must describe the attitude towards change. "Dealing with change means taking hold of and using changing market forces to the advantage of the organization" (Sashkin, 1986, p. 4). The second element is the expression of a goal. The last element of a vision is that it centers on people (employees and customers) because only through the people can the vision be put into action. Nevertheless, these elements do not help much in understanding what a vision is. Hunger and Wheelen (1992) described the vision as the forthsetting of the mission. Other authors identified certain criteria that must be fulfilled in order to get a vision. Bertudo (1990) mentioned that a vision has to be free of conventional extrapolation of past experiences; Collins and Porras (1991) stated that a vision should have no finish line, that the vision should challenge the corporation and its work force, and that a vision should have no time limit. By the way, Collins and Porras are exponents for the vision as a characteristic of the whole company. The New Book of Knowledge (Ed.: Morris, W.,1979) defined vision as a mental image produced by the imagination. A vision is seen as an unusual competence in discernment or perception. A vision is viewed as an intelligent forecast. Helpful in understanding the vision is an advertisement of the Mitel Corporation: "Vision is the power to see beyond the obvious". Another approach to explaining the necessity of a vision is to look at the components of the turbulence scale (Ansoff and McDonell, 1990). A vision might be helpful at each level of environmental turbulence. Nevertheless, in an environment that is characterized as complex, rapidly changing, discontinuous in the changes, and unpredictable, a visionary leader is essential for a company in order to stay in business. In fact, a visionary leader is more useful to a company in the described environment than to a company in an environment that is characterized as less complex, slowly changing, familiar in the changes, and forecastable. In the latter described [...]