Chapter 3

The Ideal Vision: Selecting WhereYou Are Headed and JustifyingWhy You Want to Get There

It makes good sense to ensure that where you and your organization are headed is where you should be headed. Most organizations are not clear about their purpose, and, as Bob Mager, the outstanding expert on objectives tells us, if we don’t know where we are going, we might end up someplace else.1 The Ideal Vision will provide you and your organization with clear, justifiable, and specific criteria for choosing your purpose: where you are headed and how to tell when you have arrived.

Organizations today are awash in labels about their purpose: “visions,” “missions,” “goals,” and “purposes.” Most are often silly (for example, what does “world-class” ...

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