Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Why Your Company's Vision Statement Sucks

11 May 2026 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold explains how business schools teach companies to create vision or mission statements by gathering employees, writing favorite buzzwords on a whiteboard, voting to narrow them down, and stitching the remaining words into a single sentence. He argues this method produces meaningless statements that even owners and leaders find nonsensical, yet it is treated as the sole tool for alignment. He contrasts this corporate practice with personal vision boards, which are private and cannot be shared, highlighting a lack of effective, shared vision mechanisms in organizations.

Chapters

In companies, we're taught in business school to have vision statements. So the classic way to do it is you get a bunch of great employees into a room, put a bunch of your favorite words up on a whiteboard, you vote on all the favorite words that you got. You got 7 or 8 words left over, right? You put them into one big sentence. That's your mission statement. Go team! We all walk out of those going, that sucks. Even the owner of the company or the leader of the company knows it doesn't make any sense at all. But that's the only tool we have to align you And in our lives, we're left with nothing other than a vision board which we can't share with anybody else.