Company Vision Statements Explained to Aliens.
Hello Aliens.
Today we’ll be learning about one of the most beautiful parts of life on earth: vision statements.
If you have a question about them, beam it into my mind using your telepathy.
As you learned in Earth 101, money is the favorite thing of earthlings.The best companies are the ones that make the most money. And they do that because they have the most sensual, passionate vision statements.
For those of you who sat Poetry for Martians, you can think of vision statements like a poem, but one which stops after only one sentence. There’s also another rule. The poem must describe the world in the future.
Whoever beamed this question to me, it’s a great one. Can humans predict the future?
The answer is no but we don’t like to think so. We love hearing predictions. They makes us feel superior. We nod our heads at them. It’s a helluva hoot.
Great question.
What is a vision statement?
A vision statement is beautiful to humans by being both very important and very short.
It’s written by the owners of a company about how the company wants to change the world but written in a very vague way.
Specifics are unimpressive here on earth. These words are written to impress people. Vague is impressive.
Who is a vision statement for?
The most important people to impress with a vision statement are the people who lend money to a business.
The money lenders are known as investors. They give companies money then ask for more back, but only after doing some waiting.
Business owners use the money to pay a lot of doers to make things that other earthlings will give money for.
With lots of investor money, you can have lots of doers who will sell lots of objects for lots and lots of money.
After some waiting, the owners give a lot of money to the investors, keep some themselves, and giving a little to the lots of doers. Again, everybody’s happy.
But they can’t get investor money without a vision statement.
What’s the purpose of a vision statement?
As a recap, a vision statement is a short and vague prediction of the future. When investors see a prediction, they believe it. They imagine — a prediction in their head — all this money people will pay for objects that don’t exist yet in a time we haven’t reached yet.
They nod their head and have a helluva hoot.
The purpose of a vision statement is to make an investor nod their head.
What is an example of a good and bad vision statement?
“In a year, we will have invented the easiest to use phone as voted by people in France.”
That is a truely aweful. A year isn’t that far away, so the investors will want lots of money very soon. It’s pathetically precise. Embarassing.
Owners would have to write a new vision statement in just 12 months. If the vision statement is too different, owners will look wrong. And on earth, being wrong is bad. Let’s correct this.
Because humans can’t predict the future, we need to use words that don’t have a specific meaning — ideally no meaning at all — so that in the future, we can always be correct. Or better than correct, forgotten.
“Create a future where people connect using technology”
is the best vision statement in the universe because it is very short in words, very vague, and can never be proven wrong. In 10 years, all humans will have forgotten it — most of them in 10 minutes.
But investors will nod in the here-and-now and the business owners will have predicted they will be right, although nobody can prove it.
It’s so vague that investors don’t know when they’ll get their money back or what owners will do with the investment money to make more of it.
The most important thing is that a group of humans are sitting together imagining more money — our favorite thing. That’s what it’s all about.
Everybody’s happy.
