Leading An Accounting Firm

Section 3Leading Strategy

“Hope is not a strategy.”

~ RICE PAGE

Once you’ve created your own foundation for leadership, and you’re working with empowered people and teams, where do you go? To put strategy and its components in context, we need to look at vision, mission, and values. Successful accounting firms formally and strategically plan their future. Firms may create a vision for the next year, but more typically, a firm will look 3–5 years in the future, and some extend their vision to 20 years.

In the three chapters that follow, we will closely evaluate the benefits of vision, mission, and values. These three elements form the basis of the leading strategy level in the pyramid structure of this book.

Mission permeates everything we do with strategy, but it’s not the starting point. Values define our firm, and mission touches and is bounded by our values. Mission connects the present and future: our vision. Our objectives should align with our mission and be constantly compared with the mission to ensure that we’re staying on track toward our vision and within the bounds of our values. Mission and values exist both today and in the future, whereas the vision is not truly in the present.

Vision: Reality in the Future	Mission: Making a Difference	Values: The Character, Actions, and Outcomes
Chapter 11	Chapter 13	Chapter 12
Section Three: Leading Strategy

To determine where a firm is going, leaders need to exactly know its present state. Only then can the leadership ...