OVERVIEW

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of GE

Most businesses (approximately 80 percent ^[1]) have mission and vision statements. Recognizing that it's hard to get somewhere if you don't know where you're going, companies now treat these as a standard part of corporate operations. In theory, vision, mission, and strategy are pretty straightforward: Each is a way station along the continuum of knowing where you want to end up and creating the means to get there. In practice, choosing a vision and consistently linking it to mission and strategy are challenging tasks never mind the further requirement of linking those to customer value*

When vision, mission, and strategy are aligned, unambiguous, and set a clear direction, they keep the business on course. This chapter reviews our definitions of these common business terms and explores the idea of what strategic value means in the context of a customer value-driven portfolio. We urge you to look at vision, mission, strategy, and customer value as a continuing information loop with each part influenced by the others. Once you do, youwill need to consider the important question of balance not balance as usually defined in the context of a portfolio as simply risk/reward or investment/return on two sides of a scale, but balance in terms of bringing into equilibrium the various strategic purposes of the products you decide to finance. The question of...