The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Company Vision

In this article, we’ll examine:

• What a company vision statement is

• How a company vision statement differs from a company mission statement

• How a company vision statement differs from a company strategy

• What makes up a strong company vision

• How a clear company vision statement can help transform your company into an adaptive growth machine, and examine what goes into a good company vision

• The different flavors of company vision statement

• How a company vision statement fits into a business operating system

👉 Access now: How to Build a Company Vision That Sticks [Free Course]

Why Businesses Need a Company Vision Statement

It is easy for efforts in any group of people to begin to move in different directions. In business, when employees are moving in the same direction, costs go up, growth stalls and profits decrease. 

Some of the ways this can happen:

• In the absence of a clear way to make sense of what’s happening, people will consistently make up their own way of making sense of and insert their own vision; without a clear sense of vision, everyone can quickly be working to solve very different problems.

• Efforts may lack coordination. The marketing team may be experimenting with new ideas that don’t help sales, or that don’t align with product or service delivery.

It is important to keep everyone moving in the same direction in order to keep a business healthy in terms of its fundamentals and key performance indicators, and healthy for owners, leaders and employees. 

While there are many tools to coordinate specific activities, unexpected situations arise in any business. In these types of situations, especially for businesses that are experiencing any form of change (whether from growth or outside factors), it is often not possible or practical to stop and consult with everyone before making a decision, or coordinating to take action. A stop at those moments might lead to a lost customer, a critical deadline miss, or costly delays.

Scientific research has shown that it is critical for employees to have a sense of purpose to be engaged. Similarly, research has shown that employees need a way to make sense of the drivers of business change and decision-making in order to feel that their work is meaningful. The number one motivator of performance has been shown to be making progress on meaningful work.

A company vision statement helps all employees move in the same direction and serves to keep everyone in the business.

The Benefits of Having a Company Vision in Place

A good company vision statement improves day-to-day decision making for all employees. It provides a basic filter to use for focusing work and for choosing what to ignore. A company vision statement helps guide prioritization and sequencing of work. Let’s look at these elements in detail. 

• A company vision statement provides priorities and helps you organize clear goals. For example, when you have a vision in place that clarifies the future you want to create in three years, it becomes much easier to determine the three or five items you need to prioritize for the next quarter or year. Those priorities are your must-win battles, as our friend Rebecca Homkes likes to call them. Then, once your vision has helped you outline those big three battles, you can determine exactly what you need to do in the next 12 weeks. 

• A company vision statement guides focus and decision making each day. A company vision statement provides the sense of meaning that informs your day-to-day and allows you to keep your team focused and executing. With a company vision statement, leaders can start to give people what they need to be productive, without needing to constantly micromanage them.

• Vision is essential for leadership. As leaders, the better we can get at telling the company story in a way that's easy for people to take in, the more success and less stress we’ll have, and the better we can take ownership of the direction of the organization for everyone inside it.

How a Company Vision Fits In with Other Elements of a Business Operating System

Your company vision statement defines the direction that you intend for the company to move and evolve. It is the destination in the journey metaphor. From a planning perspective, it provides a way for you to determine the numbers you need to measure and short term goals you need to set. 

A simple way to think about the role of vision in any business operating system is that along with the other benefits, you use it to:

• Call out gaps between your vision and your current operations

• Identify issues where people are not aligned

• Set goals to methodically close those gaps and solve those issues and challenges

A company vision statement provides a picture of the ideal state you are working to create. Once created, you can use it along with your actionable company core values to compare to your current operations.

The gaps between that ideal state and your current state inform your list of issues and challenges, and those in turn allow you to set and methodically achieve goals to move you close to the ideal state. 

Your company core values provide the outermost guard rails for the behaviors you believe will drive success. Inside of those guardrails, your company vision statement helps narrow the field of focus, and inform the numbers (KPIs) you use to track success and set goals.

Your KPIs and goals now inform your regular operating rhythms such as Level 10 meetings and other flavors of weekly meetings.

What are the Different Types of Company Vision Statements?

There are different flavors of company vision statements. You may only need 1 or 2 to get the benefits of a company vision statement. 

1. General and aspirational “credo” stating your general beliefs and what you believe your customers deserve. This type of vision has been popularized by research done by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Good to Great. A famous example is the original credo of Johnson and Johnson.

2. The 20-year vision. Early forms of company vision statements set 20 year targets. This kind of thinking evolved in the era of large scale planning and engineering efforts. It may be appropriate for companies that have long cycle times on projects, such as real estate development and energy exploration. It is less helpful for highly responsive businesses, because things change in ways that cannot be predicted. For such businesses, type 1 will be more important. Originally, business operating systems like Scaling Up and EOS favored a 20 year vision, borrowing heavily from Jim Collins’ work. Many authors borrowed concepts for this from early works on personal development such as Think and Grow Rich, and later, Stephen Covey’s study published as The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

3. A 10-year vision. As the pace of change accelerated around the turn of the last century, many business and leadership coaches began shortening the 20-year vision to 10 or even 5 years. This type of vision statement can be useful; it is a more adaptive version of type 2. 

4. The 3-year vision. This is an ideal form of vision because, as noted by author and experienced operator Cameron Herold, it is in a mental “sweet spot” far enough in the future that people will not reflexively ignore it, and near enough to motivate people to begin to take action. Business operating systems like EOS use a “3-year picture” to create more specifics in their vision component.  Cameron Herold created a form of vision he calls a “Vivid Vision” based on techniques he used to scale 3 companies from a few million to $100m+. 

Most approaches to building company vision statements accept the idea popularized by Simon Sinek - to “Start with Why.” ResultMaps’ point of view: The questions a leader must answer to create a Vivid Vision are the most informative and clarifying for leaders and employees alike.

We’ve distilled the questions asked by all of the business operating systems - including the research on which their formulations are based - into an easy 16 question exercise. Your answers are used by our AI-powered builder to propose both a company mission statement and company vision statement. Click here to use it for free by starting a free trial.

5 Ingredients You Can Use to Build a Vision Statement Immediately

The prospect of a company vision statement is one that inspires fear in many leaders. Most find that once they begin the process, ideas flow easily.  “Defeating the blank page” is often the biggest challenge. Here are 5 tips you can use to get started building your vision statement right now.

• Be purpose-driven: Give your team a way to connect to a larger purpose. Tell them why they are doing what they are doing, and why it matters. This is the one must-have for your vision. Get to the heart of "why."

• Be daring: Imagine a future that you create by waving a magic wand. Don't get caught up in the steps you will take just yet, and don't waste energy imagining risks. If risks and concerns do come up, document them in ResultMaps or your favorite risk-tracking tool to get them out of your head, and come back to them later. Stay focused on building a company vision by treating it as a game: "if I could wave a magic wand to create this future, what would I create?" 

• Orient to the future: Challenge the present. Vision refers to seeing the end of the journey; it is not limited to the present ground. A bold company vision statement challenges the present by saying "we may be here, but there is where we are going." So, describe the changed reality that your company has already created by taking this journey.

• Provide a simple point of focus: Think of your vision as a camera lens. It brings things into focus for you and your team. To create focus, it will need to be simple and easy to remember. 

• Inspire: The language in your company vision statement needs to invite people to take a journey with you. Provoke strong emotion and excitement with vivid imagery. That's the key to creating your enticing and clear "north star."

Embrace that ugly first draft - it’s important to get something on paper, not to create something perfect on the first try. For a more involved workshop experience in creating your vision statement, check out our free course on building a vision that sticks.

IKEA’s Vision Statement

“To create a better everyday life for the many people.”

Check out this page to see more on IKEA’s vision statement, as well more on their core values and culture.

More Examples of Company Vision Statements

• LinkedIn

• Audi

• 3M

• Apple

• Southwest Airlines

• Lego

Click here to read many more examples in our performance library.