Crafting Your Vision Statement? See How The Pros Do It

Karina Keith

Is your vision statement useful or useless? For most people, coming up with your team or company’s vision statement can be a challenge. If you’re …

Is your vision statement useful or useless?

Crafting Your Vision Statement- See How (1)For most people, coming up with your team or company’s vision statement can be a challenge. If you’re looking for tips on how to create a lasting vision statement for your team, check out some of the articles I’ve found. Hopefully they’ll create a clear path to guide you to what your vision should look like.

Creating a company vision

Inc.com’s contributor Ari Weinzweig shares a fascinating story about his own company’s growth made possible by their vision as well as 8 steps to creating one. Perhaps my favourite quote from the article:

“To be clear, a vision is not a strategic plan. The vision articulates where we are going; the plan tells us how we’re actually going to get there. We start that planning work only after we’ve agreed on the vision. Creating a plan without a vision… Well, I just can’t quite figure how one does it. Imagine asking MapQuest to give you directions but not plugging in your desired destination.”

Read more at Inc.com

6 Simple Steps To An Amazing And Inspiring Vision Statement

Our own Adriana Girdler shares her 6 easy steps to a vision statement sure to inspire. In fact, Adriana created a whole visioning program just to make sure you vision statement is boring and drab. In her program, there are 6 steps, but my favourite is step 4, which leads to a unique final visioning product I have yet to see elsewhere. It’s called the Corporate Vision Theme Song. Check out the final product here:

Read more at CornerStoneDynamics.com

Write a vision statement that works

Simon Sinek doesn’t hold back in his review of the more typical vision statement, calling most of them useless. Then shares some very specific guidelines to writing non-useless ones. His tips are worth a read, but the tip I found most intriguing: “Leave what you sell out of it. This is a statement of your vision, not what you do.”

Read more at Startwithwhy.com

 

How to write a vision statement that inspires

This 5 minute video by Erica Olsen does a great job explaining what a vision statement is. She also shares a clever idea called “The Cover Story Vision”, where you imagine your company is on the cover of a big national magazine in 5 years, what will the headline read, what will people be saying about your company. Check it out for yourself (if you want to jump to the part I just mentioned, it’s at the 4 minute mark).

Read more about Erica at http://onstrategyhq.com

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Karina Keith is a consultant with CornerStone Dynamics Inc. 'Katching up with Karina' blogs focus on the top web finds for the month. Aligning project goals along with truly understanding what motivates people to get their jobs done is what Karina does best.

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