Building Your Company’s Vision

Carlos Matias Jr

BUS 690-13

09/15/16

Building your Company’s Vision

From the HBR article of “Building your Company’s Vision”, by James Collins and Jerry Porras,  I learned the importance of a company’s core values and principles. It is also important to know that with those principles in mind that as a company you must be able to adapt to the changing world of business. A quote that I liked was, “Truly great companies understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change”. All that ties into what is known as a “Vision” which in the article was described as something that provides guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate progress toward. Some of the well-convinced visions are described to consist of two major components which are “core ideology” and “envisioned future”.

Collins and Parras break down these two components starting with the core ideology which they define as the enduring character of an organization, a consistent identity that transcends product or market life cycles. Simply put the core ideology consists of the core values and core purpose of the company. One of the most important things about core ideology that Collins and Parras stress is that it must genuine and authentic. You can’t take anyone else core values or principles and try to incorporate them into a business that has no interest in following through with them.

Collins and Parras break down the Envisioned Future component into two more components. They believe that an envisioned future consists of a 10-to-30 year audacious goal plus vivid descriptions of what it would like to achieve those goals. And then the second component is what is known as BHAGS (Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goals) which is described as a powerful way to stimulate progress.  They both stress that you must translate the vision from words to picture which they liken to vivid descriptions. They also both explain that an envisioned future and core ideology should not be confused for each other and they used great examples to separate each apart. A core ideology is like a star on the horizon that is something which is chased forever whereas envisioned future is like a mountain that is to be climbed. Envisioned future in a way keeps the company motivated and productive and helps feeds into that core ideology of always striving for what the company’s values and principles are.