Management Buzzwords Explained: Vision and Mission

Management Buzzwords Explained: Vision and Mission

This is the seventeenth in a series of essays that addresses management topics. The first ten explored "hot button" issues; the next ten satirize management "buzzwords." I base these essays on countless provocative lectures and irreverent discussions as a nutty professor of Business Administration.

Not long ago, I published an essay that discussed the word strategy as a management buzzword. There, I defined strategy as "the way an organization plans to fulfill its mission," half-apologizing for using one buzzword in the attempt to define another. I promised to get back to "mission" as a buzzword, so here goes.

As a field of academic study, Strategic Management has not been around that long. A watershed decade was the 1960s, when it became realized that Business Schools were graduating people who were properly skilled at fundamentals like finance and accounting, economics, marketing, and some other basics, but lacked the ability to integrate, or synthesize these skills into a cohesive view of the organization or a holistic skillset suitable for guiding it.

From that realization, business schools and their accreditation bodies started to insist that degrees include some program content that provided this exposure and skillset, though the framework and competencies were still ill-defined. What evolved was a body of research, scholarship and theory that today is properly called Strategic Management. This corpus of work gave us lots of buzzwords, including strategy, strategic management, competitive advantage, core competencies, and as it pertains here, vision and mission.