Vision and mission are not the same.

Being the leader of the market is not a vision… it’s bullshit.

“What is the vision of your company?”
“We want to be the leader of our market by 2025.”

This answer could have been given by any average start-up’s CEO. The answer is not wrong, but it does not answer the right question.
Wanting to be the leader of your market is not a vision… it is a goal.

Lots of CEOs around here do not understand why their people are not motivated, why they don’t help them reach the company’s goals.
So they try to bring in “more competent people”, “buy a foosball table” and finally bring in even more people in the game to achieve what they could have done with only 10 inspired people.

Why is that a reality for some people out there?

Vision.

Nowadays most of the start-ups I know forgot one important thing.
Growth is an effective tool when it helps people reaching a common goal.
So they hire a lot of “senior-everything” to lead teams of “junior-anything”.

They tell those people to build products and services all conceived around growth. So, product owners and product managers will “do their job well”… focusing on growth.

“Keep it up, we need to push new features” they’ll tell you. Teams feel stressed. The new features are not that valuable to the people and aren’t so to the products and services.
Why?

Because they don’t do it to achieve something or help their users. They do it to increase their retention rates. They only do it for growth.

They got it wrong.

Daily, people will tell you that vision is useless. That it is just another bullshit buzzword… just because they don’t understand what vision really is. They just got it wrong.

In every business plan people you’ll see a vision like the following:

We want to be the leader of xxx market by the end of xxx.

Like we said earlier, that is a goal. Not a vision.

What vision really is?

A vision is a palpable illustration of your brand’s future. Period.

A vision is the one thing that will gather people around a common set of goals. This common set of goals is what people call a mission.

Your vision is why your people came (or should have been hired) for. As a leader of your community, your mission is to articulate it to help them achieve the bigger dream that you all have. This dream is not about money, growth, or leadership on a market. The dream is about belief and mission.

Having a vision is really powerful, only when you know how to articulate it.

Mission.

Spoiler: “cool” start-ups now want to be companies with a mission. Why? Because that’s cool and the others did it… so why not us.

We won’t go down this road, let the losers do whatever they want.

They’re not wrong, having a mission is the most important thing.
But the problem is that they don’t know why.

Your mission is the why behind your company’s existence. Knowing why gives you the ability to know what you’re fighting for. So it does for your employees, clients, and followers… your community.

Vision and mission.

By combining them you’ll help your people achieve their dream… the reason why you created your company in the first place.

The only two rules:

• Your company’s mission needs to be well defined because you’ll base the articulation of your vision on it.
• Your company’s vision needs to be as palpable as possible because that is why people will follow your lead.

I hope that this article inspired you.
Have a nice day.

Alban.