Role of Vision at Mentor

Role of Vision at Mentor Graphics

The company's vision statement should provide clear guidelines for the company, it should clearly design the direction that the company should follow in order to achieve its goals and objectives. Instead, Mentor Graphics Corporation developed a series of vision statements that had nothing to do with the company's activity or situation, but sounded interesting, which seemed to be more important for the company's managers at that time.

Instead of developing a vision that would determine the necessary changes at Mentor Graphics, the company did the opposite, by developing visions in order to adapt to already existing changes provided by the external environment. This way, the company was one step behind its competitors most of the time, weakening the company's position on the market, and determining the company to lose ground in favor of its competitors.

The company's second vision statement, Beat Daisy seemed to have strengthened the company, since Mentor Graphics achieved this objective, and the company's volume of sales exceeded that of Daisy Systems. But this strengthening was not sustainable on long-term, mainly because it was not based on real capabilities of the company.

Furthermore, the company experienced with several vision statement that only weakened Mentor Graphics. Instead of using the vision to the company's advantage, top managers considered that it would be more suitable to develop vision statements that sounded very innovative, like the Six Boxes or the 10X Imperative. But such vision statements only clouded the judgment of the managers and of the employees that were supposed to apply the strategy developed by their superiors.

3. There is a series of reasons for which visions may fail (Terez, 2002). For example, if a vision is either too specific or to vague, or whether it is inadequate for the company and the situation in case, or is not realistic, it may fail to deliver the expected results.

In Mentor Graphics' case, it is obvious that the vision was too vague for what the company needed. Customers were disoriented, they could not figure out what the company was about, because the vision statement was so vague (Kotelnikov, 2001).

This was disorienting for employees also. The vision statement in case was unable to provide them the direction they needed in order to achieve the objectives established by their superiors.

Also, the company's various visions did not adapt over time. The Beat Daisy vision was suitable for the company's situation during the period in case, but the company failed to develop another suitable vision afterwards.

In other words, the company's vision was not developed based on the right reasons. This means that the entire strategy that Mentor Graphics developed was not a suitable one for the company and the situations in case. The company failed to adapt in due time to the changes produced by the environment partly because the vision was not a suitable one.

5. In the case of a company like Mentor Graphics it would have made more sense for the vision to determine the change. Given the fact that the company was at its beginnings in terms of firm life cycle, it would have been more natural for the company to develop a clear vision of what the company intends to achieve on medium term and long-term, to develop a strategy based on that vision, and to drive change based on the established vision and strategy.

But Mentor Graphics did exactly the opposite. In the company's case, the various visions implemented by the company were determined by the changes that emerged in the company's environment. In other words, instead of building its own direction, the company was permanently trying to adapt to changes imposed by external factors. This means that the company's management had little control over the direction that the company was supposed to follow and over the company's environment.

In other words, the company's management was unable to foresee the changes that emerged during the process and affected the company's activity, leading to the development of a general strategy and of more specific strategies that did not really apply in the situations incase.