The purpose of a company is to achieve its mission. The mission of a company is its reason for being, its alpha, its omega, its eternal orientation, its ultimate aspiration, its inspiration, and the reason why it exists. The day a company stops aiming to achieve its mission, it dies.

There are several ways to achieve its mission when I talk about the manner, and style I am talking about the company’s experience, and the type of interaction between employees, this style or way of working is guided and oriented by what we call the company’s values. Performance, excellence, information sharing, efficiency, respect, etc. are corporate values. They define the atmosphere of a company, its way of life, its way of living, and of realizing itself. Values are a direct result of the company’s mission. For example, if I run a narco-trafficking company, you can easily imagine the values that will follow.

So with the mission and the values, the company knows where it is going and in what framework and atmosphere it is going, now it has to know how to get there, there comes the vision and the strategic planning. Mission and values are timeless and not spatial, they exist in the ideal world of ideas, eternity, and concepts. The way in which this mission and these ideas are concretely embodied in time and space gives us a concrete vision of this company at this given moment in time and space. Vision because it is visible and embodied, palpable, while the mission and values are intangible and conceptual. So the photograph of a company at a given moment in space and time, we call it vision. The vision is always at an infinite distance from the mission because the mission is realized indefinitely. The vision shows us the steps as the rungs of a ladder taking root in the present moment and projecting into an indefinite future which is the mission and the values. A company is always in the process of achieving its mission and values. The vision is an intermediate step on the way to the realization of the mission and values, it indicates to all the collaborators where we are going in 3 years, 5 years, or 10 years. It is a tangible objective to embody the mission and values.

Now that the company knows what it wants to achieve in 5 to 10 years, it must now ask itself how it will achieve this vision. This is where strategic planning comes in, which is the strategy for achieving the vision. We will work on this or that program or project that will allow us to reach intermediate objectives, milestones, and key results, which together will allow us to bridge the gap between today’s company and tomorrow’s.