ABSTRACT
All organizations need to adapt over time – to either changes in their external competitive environments, to regulatory demands, to changing stakeholder wants and needs, or to evolving and changing internal competencies. Nevertheless, some aspects of ‘what the enterprise is there to do and how it will go about doing it’ remain relatively constant through time. These visionary ‘mission statements’ are created by organizations in order to provide the overall guiding principles for their strategic thinking and their employees’ behaviour. The enterprise’s founders often inaugurate them; although they can sometimes – but infrequently – change when the organization takes a fundamental change of direction, such as in a merger situation, where perhaps conflicting visions need to be harmonized. Essentially, what we are seeking here is the ‘glue’ that holds the whole organization together over quite a long period of time and sets the general boundaries in which an organization operates.
