Vision, Mission, and Values.
In theory, “they are the fundamental pillars of an organization’s strategic structure, defining its future, purpose, and standards of behavior.”
In practice, and often, they represent just a text copied and pasted onto websites and social media.
Vision: where the company wants to go.
Mission: what the company does.
Values: principles that govern behavior and decisions.
But, in reality, how many cases have a correspondence between theory and practice? How many fulfill the principle of “walk the talk”? Or rather, how many use this VMS triad as a mere marketing strategy?
The TV show “Silicon Valley” has an episode in which all the startups use the same approach in their pitches. Anyone who has participated in or been in the audience during a pitch session knows that it is very common.
But let’s look at the websites of companies, from micro companies to multinationals. Then, try to understand where the discourse ends and where reality begins.
In the current context, where the largest companies are involved in lawsuits for encouraging addictive behaviors, from the food industry to Big Tech, in an era where we know that social networks sell personal data (or profit from its use), or remove tools for verifying shared content, or fight against regulation when they should be helping to build the set of rules that would protect them and their users, at a time when startups have stopped selling products and services and started selling subscriptions, it’s not difficult to separate what is sales and what is purpose.
The differences between the wonderful world described in the Vision, Mission and Values area and the real world are evident. It’s not a matter of cancel culture, it’s a matter of selectivity. And establishing criteria for what is best for us and for the world we live in.
