Well, you must serve both, but you must serve your vision first before all else, before even profit. If you strive first for profit, you will get neither profit or your vision, but if you accomplish your vision you will get both. Jim Collins’s “Good to Great” is a well known strategy book published in 2001, but there is a rebuttal on the Internet that the companies he designated as “Good to Great” eventually failed to do well.  

I am not here to defend “Good to Great”, but my response is that the reason they fell is because eventually profit became the main driver before vision. Not necessarily because there were bad people running the company but because the company was not sufficiently committed to their vision. The vision of your organization can never come second to any other goal.  The world is littered with companies who appeared to have everything but were overcome because they simply could not transition fast enough.

In game theory, there is a concept of the chicken game, where two drivers are driving at each other and the one who swerves first is the loser.  Game theory proposes a solution on how to win the chicken game.  It turns out the way to be the winner is to show total commitment to going straight ahead by throwing the steering wheel out the window. That is the answer to always driving to your vision as well. Once you are pointed towards your vision, you must throw the steering wheel out the window. If you are willing to do that, you can remain great forever, provided you have created the right vision.