Vision, Mission, Values do they really add value?

One of the difficult exercises I done last one month was to remember the vision, mission and value statements of various IIMs and my last and present employer.
While mugging these flashy statements an obvious question popped up in my mind, how much value these statements add to an organization? That time I didn’t looked beyond mugging them but thanks to Gita Piramal’s Smart Leadership I realized the real importance to an organization.

While reading Becoming Great an essay in above book by Dr. S Ramadorai of TCS who aptly describes the importance of these statements to align individual interest with the common interest of an organization, my view to look towards these statements changed drastically. One more important thing I noticed about these statements is, it better for any organization to define them at right time. From my opinion such right time is when you are starting a new setup or restructuring your organization. I am not at all agreed that you can introduce these statement any time and force employees to accept them. The onus lies on the shoulder of the leader not only to make sure these statements should reach to each and every employee but also they should get reflected through their every action.

After getting aware about the importance of these statements I realized if I define these statements for SPANDAN it will be surely helpful. The result was after pondering over this for1 hr in my train journey to Mumbai I came up with Vision, Mission and Values statement for SPANDAN. Now my next responsibility is to take steps so that they will reach at every SPANDAN member very soon.

Thinking on same line an idea came up in my mind that could an individual have these statements? If I go by my above statement of aligning interest how an individual can get benefited with these statements? In organization context there these statements are helpful as everyone have different vision and they help to achieve the convergence of these vision. If you look at personal front each one of us have different mission at different time of our life. Our vision gets change with time and many times we found ourselves lack of values or compromising with our values. This all result into diverting from our mission. So having clearly defined mission, vision and value statements will surely help oneself in journey of his life. So one more exercise for me to define these statements for myself and I am thinking this is right time to do so as I am going through one big transformation in my life. Very soon you will find my mission, vision and value statement on this page, which will surely help you to define your own statements. I hope you will enjoy this exercise. After all it’s not of anyone else’s but for your own benefit.