Mission, Vision and Values Template: Write Values That Cost Something

Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence.

Patrick Lencioni opened a 2002 Harvard Business Review article with that list of four corporate values and asked whether they sounded good ¹. They do. They might be your company's. They were Enron's, as claimed in its 2000 annual report, and Lencioni called them meaningless ¹.

Nine years later Richard Rumelt described the template that produces lists like it. Under “The Values,” it says: fill in a statement of the company's values, make sure they are noncontroversial, and use key words such as “integrity,” “respect” and “excellence” ³. He meant it as a warning. It reads like instructions.

The short answer. A mission, vision and values template has three parts. The mission says why the organization exists and whom it serves. The vision describes what it intends to become, with a goal you could fail to reach. The values name the few principles that govern how people decide and behave, including when they are inconvenient. How the three differ, and where strategy fits, is covered in mission vs. vision vs. strategy.

This page gives you the template and one rule for filling it in. Each statement earns its place only where it costs something. A mission that turns no work away, a vision nobody could miss, and values that have never cost a deal, a hire or a quarter are decoration. Decoration is not harmless: Lencioni argues that empty values statements create cynical, dispirited employees and undermine managerial credibility ².

If a value has never cost you anything, it is decoration.

Why this template is dangerous, and how to use it anyway

Rumelt names template-style planning, filling in the blanks with vision, mission, values and strategies, as one of two roots of bad strategy he singles out ³. In his description, the last box asks you to “fill in some aspirations/goals but call them strategies” ³. The danger is real: a team can finish the template, feel it has done strategy, and have chosen nothing.

So this template does two things differently. First, it stops at values. It has no strategy box, because a strategy needs a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy and coherent actions, which no fill-in-the-blank form produces; the good strategy, bad strategy checklist covers that work. Second, every field has a cost prompt. If you cannot answer the cost prompt, the field is not finished, however good the wording sounds.

Used this way, the three statements do a job the strategy cannot. Strategies change every few years. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras argue that companies that enjoy enduring success have a core purpose and core values that stay fixed while their strategies and practices endlessly adapt ⁴. The template captures the part that should not change, so the strategy can.

The template

Copy the fields below. The cost prompt is the one most teams skip, and the one that makes the statement useful.

Keep the finished page to one side of paper. If a value needs a paragraph to explain, it is probably two values or none.

Writing values that mean something

The most useful definition of a core value comes from Collins and Porras: an organization's essential and enduring tenets, the values it would hold even if they became a competitive disadvantage ⁴. That clause is the cost test in its purest form. A value you would drop the moment it hurt is a preference.

Lencioni's article gives four imperatives for values that mean something: understand the different types of values, be aggressively authentic, own the process, and weave core values into everything ². His four types are core, aspirational, permission-to-play and accidental values ². In practice the split catches the two most common errors. An aspirational value describes what the company wishes it were; listing it as a core value tells employees the statement is fiction. A value every competitor would claim, such as integrity, is better treated as the price of entry than as a distinction.

A real statement makes choices, and the clearest choices are rankings. Johnson & Johnson's Credo, which the company says Robert Wood Johnson wrote in 1943, shortly before it became publicly traded, is built as an order of responsibilities ⁵. It begins: “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers…” It moves on to employees and to communities, and only then reaches “Our final responsibility is to our stockholders” ⁵. The company describes the Credo as spelling out the values that guide its decision-making ⁵. Whatever one thinks of how any company has lived up to its statement, the form is instructive: an order tells people what to do when two goods conflict, and a list does not.

• The cost test. Name the last time keeping this value cost money, speed or a person. No example, no value.
• The rival test. Would your strongest competitor publish the same word? If yes, say what it means here that it does not mean there, or drop it.
• The removal test. Would you remove a high performer who repeatedly broke this value? If not, it is not a value yet.
• The conflict test. When two values collide, or a value collides with this quarter's numbers, does the statement say which wins?

A list of values tells people what is good. An order tells them what to do when two goods collide.

Mission and vision: the direction fields

Collins and Porras split a vision into two parts: a core ideology (core values plus core purpose, the organization's fundamental reason for being) and an envisioned future (bold stretch goals plus vivid descriptions of what achieving them will mean) ⁴. Their example of a vivid description is Henry Ford's: “When I'm through…everyone will have one. The horse will have disappeared from our highways” ⁴. They also observe that the usual vision statement is fuzzy and inspires only boredom ⁴.

Two practical consequences for the template. The mission should be the most stable sentence on the page; if you are rewriting it with each new CEO, it is probably describing a strategy. And the vision needs the vivid description, not just the target. “Top-quartile margins by 2030” is a goal. What a customer, an employee and a competitor will notice when you get there is what makes people able to act on it. The Lexicon entries on the mission statement and the vision statement cover the definitions.

A filled-in example

The organization below is invented. Compare the first draft with the finished version, field by field.

Notice three things. The finished version is shorter on adjectives and longer on consequences. Every value now names something the agency gives up. And the rule at the end tells a scheduler at 6 a.m. on a short-staffed Monday exactly what to do, which no amount of “compassion” and “excellence” could.

Running the process

1. Start from hard decisions, not wordsCollect ten real decisions from the last two years where the organization gave something up for a principle: a client fired, a product delayed, a hire refused. The values are in those stories. Collins and Porras describe identifying core ideology as a discovery process ⁴.
2. Draft with a small groupWrite the first draft with five to eight people who have made those decisions, including at least one skeptic. Large workshops average the language until it offends no one.
3. Run the four tests on every valueCost, rival, removal and conflict. Cut any value that fails two. Move any value the organization wants but does not yet live to a separate aspirations list.
4. Test the draft on new hiresAsk three people who joined in the last six months whether the values describe what they have seen. If they laugh, believe them.
5. Wire it into decisionsAdd the values to hiring interviews, promotion criteria and the reasons given for removing people. A value that appears in none of those is a poster.
6. Review on a scheduleLeave the mission and values alone unless something fundamental changes. Revisit the vision when its date arrives or its goal proves wrong.

The case for bland values, taken seriously

There is a serious defense of the generic statement. A large organization spans countries, businesses and generations of employees. Broad values such as respect and integrity are easy to agree with, which is the point: they hold a coalition together. Specific values divide people, and every specific sentence is one a lawyer or a business unit head will contest.

Part of that is right. Some values are the minimum standard for working anywhere, and stating them does no harm. The mistake is thinking they do the work of values. Lencioni's argument is that hollow statements are often highly destructive, not harmless ². The mechanism is simple: employees compare the words with what they see. A broad value that leadership visibly breaks teaches the whole organization that the statement is not meant to be believed, and that lesson spreads to every other statement on the page.

For heads of strategy there are two further problems at scale. First, business units write their own values and missions, and over time the set drifts until the corporate statement and the unit statements disagree. Keep one master statement and let units add behaviors, not new values. Second, values and incentives compete, and incentives usually win. If the bonus plan pays for this quarter's margin and the values say the visit always happens, people will believe the bonus plan. Change the incentive or change the value; do not leave them in conflict.

The statement is not the strategy, and it should not pretend to be. Its job is to settle the arguments that will come up under every strategy the company ever has. For how those arguments then feed the strategy itself, see Playing to Win, where the winning aspiration is one of five linked choices.

Monday morning

Take your organization's current values. Next to each one, write the last decision in which keeping it cost something, with the date. Then show the list to a colleague who will tell you the truth.

Values with a date next to them are real. Values without one are either aspirations, which belong on a separate list, or decoration, which belongs nowhere. Enron's four words would fit on almost anyone's wall. That was the problem with them. A values statement worth keeping is one your competitors would not want to sign.

Questions

What should a mission, vision and values template include?

A mission (why the organization exists and whom it serves), a vision (a stretch goal with a measure and a date, plus a short description of what achieving it looks like) and three to five values, each with observable behaviors and a rule for what wins when it conflicts with something else. Add a cost prompt to every field: what this statement tells you to give up.

How many core values should a company have?

Few enough that people can remember them and apply them in a hard moment, usually three to five. More important than the number is that each value passes a cost test: you can name a recent decision where keeping it cost money, speed or a person. Values that fail that test are aspirations or decoration.

What makes a good core value?

Collins and Porras define core values as an organization's essential and enduring tenets, the values it would hold even if they became a competitive disadvantage. In practice, a good value is specific to your organization, shows up in hiring and removal decisions, and says what wins when it conflicts with another value or with short-term results.

What is wrong with values like integrity, respect and excellence?

Nothing, as standards. The problem is that almost every organization claims them, so they do not guide decisions or distinguish anyone. Enron listed communication, respect, integrity and excellence in its 2000 annual report. Treat values every rival would claim as minimum standards, and save the values list for principles that cost you something.

Where to go next

• Mission vs. Vision vs. Strategy: What Goes Where
• Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: Rumelt's Kernel Test as a Checklist
• Mission Statement
• Vision Statement
• Values-to-Economics Worksheet