What is a Vision?- Stamats Higher Education Marketing Blog

Jul 2nd 09 Posted by Bob Sevier in Featured Articles, Leadership

What is a Vision?

Because the purpose of a strategic plan is to help a college or university achieve its vision, it is important to have a clear sense of what a vision is. According to Burt Nanus, a vision is a “realistic, credible, and attractive future” shared by members of an organization.

Visions are not about the past or what you hold sacred (that’s pretty much the domain of the mission statement). Rather, they are all about the future. A well-crafted vision serves the same purpose as that picture on the top of the puzzle box. It is a guide, a sense of what you should look like.

The need for vision in organizations

Karl Albrecht uses a northbound train to describe how important a vision is to an organization. Albrecht says the northbound train conveys an unwavering commitment to a particular direction. “No vision statement can ever make much sense unless it originates in some valid concept about what it takes to succeed. It is not a platitude. It is not a slogan. It is not an exercise in journalism; it is an exercise in careful, clear, creative, disciplined, and mature thought. It provides a critical success premise that leaders can understand, commit to, and dramatize to others.”

Attributes of a vision

The jaundiced among us may believe that visions are no longer important. James Kouzes and Barry Posner, however, strongly argue that in cynical times, a vision is even more important because:

It focuses on a better future
It encourages hopes and dreams
It appeals to core values
It emphasizes the strength of a unified group
It uses word pictures, images, and metaphors
It communicates enthusiasm and kindles excitement

My next post will take a look at some sample visions.

Photo by: orangeacid

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If you need help developing or executing a compelling strategy, please drop me an
e-mail. I would enjoy a chance to chat. You can reach me at bob.sevier@stamats.com.

Wilma Mathews

Some of the best vision statements come from non-profit organizations. In one case, the non-profit’s work was to simultaneously educate people and organizations about mental illnesses, while also working to integrate mental illness education into medical school/intern/residency education. In short, they wanted to cut out the middle man (their organization). Their vision? “To be out of business by the year XXXX.”
http://www.schreiner.edu Tim Summerlin

Having delivered my first formal vision address (OK, there have been numerous statements, reports and presentations that dance around the topic, but this was the first with that word in the title) to our board after 10 years at Schreiner, eight as president, I believe that visions require us to have at least as accurate eyesight for the present as for the future. Future vision rests on the ability to look honestly at the present, and for the last ten months that present has been pretty ragged for most of us. But one could argue that hard times are perhaps the best time for sharpening the most compelling visions.
Bob Sevier

I agree with Wilma. It is a right, noble, and lofty vision for an NGO to work itself out of a job. However, there is another lesson here. Originally, March of Dimes focused on polio. With that cure in place, the organization, in part recognizing its ablity to mobilize people and raise $, changed its vision so it could focus on other childhood diseases.
Bob Sevier

Hard times are the best time to examine our vision. Ulimately, all visions must attract a sufficient resource base. Tough economic times help society decide which organizations, including schools, it no longer needs. Schools with a poor resource base (high discount rate and uncertain fundraising) [The Chronicle recently called these "the colleges in the middle."] will face increasingly punitive times unless their vision galvanizes support.