The vision trap

At Mentor Graphics Corporation, Gerry Langeler was the executive responsible for vision, and vision, he discovered, has the power to weaken a strong company. Mentor helped to invent design-automation electronics in the early 1980s, and by the end of the decade, it dominated the industry. In its early days, fighting to survive, Mentor's motto was Build Something People Will Buy. Then when clear competition emerged in the form of Daisy Systems, a startup that initially outsold Mentor, the watchword became Beat Daisy. Both "visions" were pragmatic and immediate. They gave Mentor a sense of purpose as it developed its products and gathered momentum. Once Daisy was beaten, however, company vision began to self-inflate. As Mentor grew more and more successful, Langeler formulated vision statements that were more and more ambitious, grand, and inspirational. The company traded its gritty determination to survive for a dream of future glory. The once explicit call for effective action became a fervid cry for abstract perfection. The first step was Six Boxes, a transitional vision that combined goals for success in six business areas with grandiose plans to compete with IBM at the level of billion-dollar revenues. From there, vision stepped up to the 10X Imperative, a quality-improvement program that focused on arbitrary goals and measures that were, in fact, beyond the company's control. The last escalation came when Mentor Graphics decided to Change the Way the World Designs. The company had stopped making product and was making poetry. Finally, in 1991, after six years of increasing self-infatuation, Mentor hit a wall of decreasing indicators. Langeler, who had long since begun to doubt the value of abstract visions, reinstated Build Something People Will Buy. And Mentor was back to basics, a sense of purpose back to its workplace.