One of the first things that any observer of management thought and practice asks is whether a particular organization has a vision and mission statement. In addition, one of the first things that one learns in a business school is the importance of vision and mission statements.
This article is intended to elucidate on the reasons why vision and mission statements are important and the benefits that such statements provide to the organizations. It has been found in studies that organizations that have lucid, coherent, and meaningful vision and mission statements return more than double the numbers in shareholder benefits when compared to the organizations that do not have vision and mission statements. Indeed, the importance of vision and mission statements is such that it is the first thing that is discussed in management textbooks on strategy.
Some of the benefits of having a vision and mission statement are discussed below:

• Above everything else, vision and mission statements provide unanimity of purpose to organizations and imbue the employees with a sense of belonging and identity. Indeed, vision and mission statements are embodiments of organizational identity and carry the organizations creed and motto. For this purpose, they are also called as statements of creed.
• Vision and mission statements spell out the context in which the organization operates and provides the employees with a tone that is to be followed in the organizational climate. Since they define the reason for existence of the organization, they are indicators of the direction in which the organization must move to actualize the goals in the vision and mission statements.
• The vision and mission statements serve as focal points for individuals to identify themselves with the organizational processes and to give them a sense of direction while at the same time deterring those who do not wish to follow them from participating in the organization’s activities.
• The vision and mission statements help to translate the objectives of the organization into work structures and to assign tasks to the elements in the organization that are responsible for actualizing them in practice.
• To specify the core structure on which the organizational edifice stands and to help in the translation of objectives into actionable cost, performance, and time related measures.
• Finally, vision and mission statements provide a philosophy of existence to the employees, which is very crucial because as humans, we need meaning from the work to do and the vision and mission statements provide the necessary meaning for working in a particular organization.

As can be seen from the above, articulate, coherent, and meaningful vision and mission statements go a long way in setting the base performance and actionable parameters and embody the spirit of the organization. In other words, vision and mission statements are as important as the various identities that individuals have in their everyday lives.
It is for this reason that organizations spend a lot of time in defining their vision and mission statements and ensure that they come up with the statements that provide meaning instead of being mere sentences that are devoid of any meaning.

 

A product can be thought of as a bundle of attributes. The attributes of many physical
products include their form, features, performance, durability, reliability, style, and design. Product is said to have superior quality when customers perceive that its attributes
provide them with higher utility than the attributes of products sold by rivals. For example, iPhone  mobile phone has attributes—such as design, styling, performance, and reliability—that customers perceive as being superior to the same attributes in many other mobile phones. Thus,we can refer to  iPhone as a high-quality product: iPhone has differentiated its mobile phones by these attributes.

When customers evaluate the quality of a product, they commonly measure it against
two kinds of attributes: those related to quality as excellence and those related to quality
as reliability. From a quality-as-excellence perspective, the important attributes are things
such as a product’s design and styling, its aesthetic appeal, its features and functions,
the level of service associated with the delivery of the product, and so on.

Customers can purchase a pair of imitation leather boots for $25 from Wal-Mart, or they can
buy a handmade pair of butter-soft leather boots from Nordstrom for $500. The boots from
Nordstrom will have far superior styling, feel more comfortable, and look much better than
those from Wal-Mart. The value consumers will get from the Nordstrom boots will in all
probability be much greater than the value derived from the Wal-Mart boots, but of course,
they will have to pay far more for them. That is the point: when excellence is built into a
product offering, consumers must pay more to own or consume it.

With regard to quality-as-reliability perspective, a product can be said to be reliable when it consistently performs the function it was designed for, performs it well, and rarely, if ever,
breaks down. As with excellence, reliability increases the value (utility) a consumer gets
from a product, and thus the price the company can charge for that product and/or demand
for the product.
The concept of quality applies whether we are talking about Toyota automobiles,
clothes designed and sold by Versace, Verizon’s wireless service, the customer service department of Barclays, or the ability of airlines to arrive on time. Quality is just as relevant to
services as it is to goods. The impact of high product quality on competitive advantage is
twofold. 

First, providing high-quality products increases the value (utility) those products
provide to customers, which gives the company the option of charging a higher price for
the products. In the automobile industry, for example, Toyota has historically been able to
charge a high

Second, greater efficiency and lower unit costs associated with reliable products of high
quality impact competitive advantage. When products are reliable, less employee time is
wasted making defective products, or providing substandard services, and less time has to
be spent fixing mistakes—which means higher employee productivity and lower unit costs.
Thus, high product quality not only enables a company to differentiate its product from that
of rivals, but, if the product is reliable, it also lowers costs.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate : our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who  am  I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you not to be?….As we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same” Nelson Mandela

I am opening my article with the great and valuable quote said by Nelson Mandela. He was a great leader , his leadership, many people has shed the light to many people in this world.

John Maxwell defines Leadership as “influence. That’s it! Nothing more and nothing less! He who thinks he leads and has no one following him/her is only taking a walk” Hogan  et.al (1994;493) argue that leadership is  “persuasion, not domination; persons who can require others to do their bidding because of their power are not leaders”

Generally the term can be defined as the process whereby an individual influence other in attaining the particular goals. These influenced individuals become to see those particular goals as theirs.

When we put our grasp to these definitions, we capture the frequently appeared terms which are Influence, People and Goals.


 
Influence; Is an act of making a person to do what you want him/her to do. Naturally every person has got an influence to his/her fellow but the degree varies from person to person, as Maxwell  puts as “Did you know that each of us influence at least ten thousands other people during our life time……?

People; In leadership arena, people are grouped into those who lead (leaders) and those who are led (followers/subordinates). People as thinking animals are the same, but under leadership arena they are grouped due to their personalities. Personalities are of two kinds; internal personality which involves person’s status and predictability. Another kind of personality is external which involves person’s reputation.

Goals; These are expected situations or conditions after accomplishment of a particular task.Goals are the sticky substance that bring together leaders and their subordinates in attaining such particular goals.