Conclusion
Review
By now you have created a personal and corporate Mission, and you have written out your personal and corporate Values. Through the study of your personal goals and your business' strategic objectives, you have created personal and corporate Vision statements accompanied by a Life Map and a Strategic Map. Your business now has a solid foundation that is in complete agreement with your personal Mission, Values and Vision. Let’s quickly review those three to make sure that you are absolutely clear on what they are, the differences between them, and why they are essential for your foundation.
Mission: The Purpose of a company. The reason that it exists.
Google's Mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Values: The ethics and beliefs of a company. The rules that it exists by.
Google's "10 things we know"
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It's best to do one thing really, really well.
Fast is better than slow.
Democracy on the web works.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
You can make money without doing evil.
There’s always more information out there.
The need for information crosses all borders.
You can be serious without a suit.
Great just isn’t good enough.
Vision: The aspirations of a company. The goals that it plans to achieve.
Google's Vision is to develop a perfect search engine.
Conclusion
Your Personal and Corporate Foundations are made up of living documents and should be revisited from time to time. We are not talking about going through the process all over again, but it’s important to make sure that both you and your plans stay on the road to your Personal and Corporate Missions. In order to make progress, you’re going to need to know how you are doing and the only way you can find that out is to ask. Ask your employees, ask your customers, ask everyone who does business with your company because you need to know. Guesswork is simply not good enough.
Leading companies teach their people to question what they do, and why they do it. They challenge their people to take a fresh look at their company and to get involved in creating its future. Competition is increasing, profit margins are under attack, and the world is moving faster than ever before. It’s easy to get caught in a rut, to go through each day like it was the one before, but that won’t cut it in the business world of tomorrow. To stay competitive, you’ve got to stay on the cutting edge.
But what if your people came to work each day, excited and ready for the challenge of building your company? What if everyone fully understood how their work was connected to the Mission, Vision and Values of your company and how vitally important it was to its success? What would it be like? It would be outstanding.
Very few people learn how to live their lives to the fullest. They’ve never been encouraged to step outside of the box. As a business owner, you’ve got a wonderful opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.
"You have a vision of what life can become. That’s why you do what you do. Make your life and your business outstanding, and challenge your employees to do the same."