Living Supply Chains: How to Mobilize the Enterprise Around Delivering What Your Customers Want

Appendix 4A. Formulation of vision statement

The task of formulating a vision statement is quite daunting. Certainly, it is achieved rarely by taking executives away on a weekend retreat to debate the future of the organization. Our experience over years of empirical work with top management teams is that a template is required when embarking on this undertaking. This, combined with a facilitated real-time environment, is the only way to achieve a meaningful, yet practical, vision statement. We have developed a vision template through working with hundreds of management teams over a decade; it has four components as indicated below, all of which are essential.

Contextual

The first component of our vision template is the context within which the ...