My fundamental principle with regard to vision creation is, “Your vision should be the same for your company and for your customers.”  At first glance, this statement probably seems a little strange.  The customers’ vision for shopping may be something like being able to buy things at a good price and as easily as possible. Can Amazon have that same vision? No, but to achieve long term growth Amazon’s vision must enable the customers’ vision. It must define its success as the customer’s success. The reason this is so critical is that successful customers make successful companies and unsuccessful customers will make unsuccessful companies.  When a company has something else as its vision, something else as its primary goal, the time will come when it will sacrifice customer success to accomplish that goal.  It will take shortcuts to save money, it will increase prices and take advantage of a customer’s trust, or it will create hurdles to change behavior.   These actions may work temporarily to improve the organization’s financial position, but ultimately those actions will fail because the customer is not satisfied.