All organizations, from big to small, undergo fundamental changes at some point of their existence. What drives companies to put themselves at risk is the determination to cope better with new demands and challenges of the market environment. The expected outcome is for them to climb higher on the staircase of success. However, too often, the obtained outcome is a period of utter chaos, governed by confusion and financial losses, with little or no gain in return.
Partly willing, partly strained, organizations today have made drastic changes within their strategies and general management processes. Companies face the highest degree of public exposure ever known in history. Technically, every little bit of information, whether disclosed or not, can, and it will, eventually, find its way to a public. The sole solution for a company is to purposely expose itself or, simply put, to lay the cards on the table.
The presentation “Current Trends in Strategic Management and Performance Measurement: Evidence from Japan” was delivered in the second day of the PMA 2014 Conference by Ing. Michaela Blahová, of the Centre of Applied Economic Research of the Faculty of Management and Economics of Tomas Bata University in Zlín, PhD. Parissa Haghirian, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts of Sophia University, Tokyo, and Přemysl Pálka, Academic and Vice-Dean for international relations at the Faculty of Management and Economics of Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic.
The pursuit of organizational clarity and alignment towards a strategic direction has preoccupied researchers and practitioners for many decades. Especially over the last 50 years, a variety of management concepts have been popularized and adopted by organizations with more or less success.
Two such management concepts that gained popularity since then are mission and vision statements. They are considered strategic management tools or instruments, one of the clearest definitions for both being: “The mission statement is a statement of a company’s purpose,…, if mission outlines what the company is attempting to achieve at the present time, its vision offers a view of what the enterprise might become.” (Grant 2002: 60).
The term “mission” is reported to have been used first by Jesuit monks, to depict the act of sending monks on overseas missions, such as the missions in the 16th century in South America, following the landing of Christopher Columbus (Merino and Newson 1995). Over time, the use of the term expanded from religion to the military, who used it to reflect a specific assignment allocated as part of a plan or strategy. The link between military and business vocabulary was facilitated by books such as “On War” by Carl von Clausewitz (1832), considered one of the most important treaties on the philosophy of war. An entire section of the book (“Of strategy in general”) was dedicated to strategy and is considered today an important precursor of strategy management literature.
