Losing Focus and Clarity of Vision
I love the comic strip Frank adn Ernest. On 4/30/09 A guy is attaching an additional sign to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms which reads “. . . and Trans Fats.” Frank or Ernest (I can never tell who is who) says, “I worry that we’re losing our focus.”
I have seen too many vision and mission statements that are just a hodgepodge of well-meaning phrases. I’ll be they started off fine, with a clear focus, but then barnacles started attaching to the hull, and soon it was hard to tell where the ship was heading in the first place.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:18 am
Interesting. I’ve recently been pondering the significance of a move I made this year from a massive global corporation to a 4-person start-up. The mission statement process at the large company was maddening–buzzwords, vagueness, and ultimately pointless as the exercise was finished (or not) and forgotten. The start-up has never been through this process, and yet the vision and focus are crisp and clear, with people speaking the same language. A lot of it is a function of size and hours spent in close proximity, of course, but I’ve been wondering if the process itself is an indication of incoherence, a band-aid that conveys a cry for help rather than a sense of clarity. I don’t know the answers; it’s just a series of thoughts.