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Bhagwan Mahavir Collage Of Business Administration T.Y. B.B.A 6 Sem. Marketing Management
Subject Strategic Management Name Parth K. Doshi Roll No. 05

th

Submitted To: - Vishal Sir

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Assignment on Orangnisational Vision Features of Good Vision Role of Vision Developing vision

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Vision
Vision is the starting point of expressing an organizations strategic intent. Nations have vision; organization has vision; and individual have vision. They have vision either explicitly or implicitly. In spite this phenomenon; there is lack of unanimity about the exact content of vision. Let have an attempt to develop clarity about vision. In dictionaries, one of the several meanings of the word vision is a mental image of what the future will or could be like. Taking this meaning in organization context, we may say that vision represents what the organization would be in future; it implies that organization should create projections about where it should go in future and what major challenges lie ahead. This statement appears to be effective practitioners point of view but lack clarity from academic point of view. Therefore, let us go through academic exercise relating to defining and describing vision. Burt Nanus, as well-known expert of organizational vision, has defined vision as realistic, credible, and attractive future for an organization. Let us dissect this definition. It contains four elements.

1) Realistic: - A vision must be based on reality to be meaningful for an organization; it should not be merely day-dreaming but a dream to be converts into reality. 2) Credible: - A vision must be believable to be relevant to members of this organization concerned. If the members of the organization do not find the vision credible. It will not be meaningful or serve a useful purpose. One of the purpose of a vision is to aspire those on the organization to achieve a level of excellence, and to provide direction for there actions. 3) Attractive: - A vision must be attractive so as to aspire and motivate organizational members. People must want to be a part of future that is envisioned for the organization. 4) Future: - A vision is not for the present; it is for the future. Simply, a vision is not where an organization is now but where it will be in future.

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Oren Harari, another expert on organization vision, defines vision as follows: Vision should describe a set of ideals and priorities, a picture of the future, a sense of what makes the company special and unique, a core set of principles that the company stands for, and a broad set of compelling criteria that will help define organizational success. This definition adds two or more dimensions a core set of principles and criteria for measuring success in defining vision. An additional framework for w=examining vision has been put by Collins and Porras. They conceptualize vision as having two major components: a guiding philosophy and a tangible image. Guiding philosophy is a system of fundamental motivating assumptions, principle, value, and tenets. Guiding philosophy stems from the organizations core beliefs and value and purpose. Tangible image is composed of a mission and a vivid description. According to Collins and Porras, Mission is a clear and compelling goal that serve to unify an organization effort. Vivid description is a picture of the end that completion of the mission represents. As opposed to Nanus, Collins and Porras do not focus on a vision statement, but on vision as consisting of element mentioned above. A perusal of stand about vision taken by Collins and Porras suggests that they taken a wider view of vision by treating mission as a component of vision while current trend in strategic management, both at academic as well as practice levels, makes distinction between these two terms which we shall discuss later in this chapter. Based on the above discussion, we may define vision as follows: Vision is a mental perception of the kind of environment an organization aspires to create within a broad time horizon and underlying conditions for the actualization of this perception.

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Features of a Good Vision

Feature if a Good Vision is as follows: 1) A good vision is idealistic. Though this feature of vision is contrasting with the statement that vision should be realistic, however, both feature can be reconciled. Vision should be realistic so that people believe that it is achievable, but idealistic enough so that it cannot be achieved without stretching. 2) A good vision clarifies direction for the organization concerned. It should provide answer to the question, where will the organization go in future. 3) A good vision inspires organization members and encourages commitment from them. This inspiration and commitment is the key to achieving what the vision envisages. 4) A good vision reflects the uniqueness of the organization, its distinctive competence, what it stands for, and what it is able to achieve. 5) A good vision is appropriate for the organization and for the times, it implies that the vision should be consistent with organizations values and culture and its place in its environment. 6) A good vision is well articulated and easily understood by those who are responsible to convert it into reality.

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Role of Vision in Strategy formulation

We have seen that starting point of strategy formulation is establishing strategic intent containing vision, mission, and objective. Vision occupies the top position in this hierarchy. Therefore, all strategic actions should focus on vision to convert it into reality. In general, vision helps in formulating strategies in the following manner: 1) Vision provide clue about where the organization is heading for in future. Since various strategies try to ensure that the organization reaches its destination, these should be in accordance with the vision. In fact, action without vision is just like passing time. 2) Vision of an organization tries to place it in a unique position when requires unique actions. These actions are defined by various strategies. 3) Since vision is a source of inspiration to organizational member and encourages them for commitment, they tend to give their full contribution in strategy formulation and implementation.

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Developing a Vision
Developing a Vision is like having a dream to be covered into reality in future. Therefore, a question is: who does formulate vision for an organization? There may not be a clear-cut answer of this question because of difference in organization practices. For example, in a family-managed organization, the head of family may set the vision though he may consult key member of the family. In order types of organization, vision is the outcome of agreement of various stakeholders both within the organization and outside it. For example, in the case of public sector organizations. Government plays a key role in defining where the organizations should go in future. Irrespective of this difference, following steps are relevant for developing a vision. 1) Conducting a Vision Audit: - First step in developing a vision is to assess the current direction and momentum of the organization. At this stage, key question that should be answered are: does the organization have a clearly-stated vision? What is the organizations current direction? Do the key organizational leader know where the organization is headed and degree of the direction? 2) Targeting the Vision: - This step involves starting to narrow on a Vision. At this step, key question are: What are the boundaries and constraints to the vision? What must vision accomplish? What critical issues must be addressed in the vision? 3) Setting the Vision Context: - Since vision is the desirable future for the organization, there is need for identifying what the organizations future environment might look like. However, vision has a very long-term orientation and, therefore, only broad direction of future environment should be identified rather than going for elaborate forecasting of environment.

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4) Developing the Future Scenarios: - Developing the future scenarios follow directly from setting the vision context. Scenarios are the likely future behaviors of the environment. Since distant future environment cannot be predicted accurately, alternative scenarios are developed for different environment behaviors. Based in these scenarios, on organization readies it to operate in the best possible scenarios. When the environment does not behave according to this, alternative scenarios are used. 5) Generating the Alternative Visions: - At this stage, possible visions are developed for possible environments. The purpose of these steps is to generate vision reflecting different directions in which the organization may go. At this stage, it is better that different directions use a relatively unconstrained approach. 6) Choosing the Final Vision: - Here, alternative visions are evaluated in the light of environment variable as well as organizational variables. That vision is selected which is most likely to meet the demands of these variable.