Day #38: Mission, Vision, Core Values and Goals

Last week we were discussing different concepts useful when it comes to finish the second assignment of the course, ie. the evaluation of a real company. One of the basic ideas is the mission/vision/core values/goal statement, yet some companies have not devoted enough time to it and they may have mixed ideas. Other times, their mission and vision is not easily available for the potential customers! 

But for academic purposes and for our own good, let's try to clarify using the ideas from this blog. 

Mission is what a company does, and it should be short and easy, instead of using big fancy words. For example, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accesible and useful. 

Vision is what your company aspires to be, which should help driving decisions at a strategic level. For example, Disney's vision is to make people happy.

Core Values shape the culture and describe what is important in the company. They should be limited to five, otherwise they start to be  difficult to remember... Some examples are honesty, efficiency, open-mindedness...

Goals are the objectives of the company, and they shouldn't be too vague, like have the best product ever, or create a nicer product. Some better examples could be open a office in New York, add one developer with expertise in Java  and so on. 

In my opinion, the most problematic is to keep these statements simple, with a reduced number of words. People want to say much and present themselves as fancy companies, but in the end nobody understands what they are saying. And if they do, they won't probably remember!

Disney wants to make people happy! Image from elespanol.com

Day #33: Business strategy

Following the Monday post with some tips about how to deal with some of the course assignments, it is time to focus on business strategy. This is a key concept which needs to be analyzed or described before checking whether a company's portfolio is aligned with it or not. 

However, when looking for such words in The Portfolio Standard from PMI, they barely appear. So maybe we should try to find some hints about what business strategy is and how it can be described.

There are some good descriptions in several websites, for instance here o here. The basics are shortly described in this post.

Firstly, business strategies can be classified into three levels: 

• Corporate level, which sets the broadest guidelines of what is to be achieved and how it will be done.
• Business unit level, which is a specific strategy depending on the unit of business.
• Functional level, which are specific for the departments within the units, like marketing, sales, operations and so on. 

Then, when the objective is decided, the answers to all W-questions regarding the strategy (what, when, why, how...) should be answered. In order to do that, there are some useful tools such as: 

• Mission, vision and core values. 
• SWOT
• Resource allocation plan
• KPI
• ...