While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

It was Stephen Covey's book in 1989 that brought to the people's attention the importance of "mission statement" for individuals, families, and organizations. American businesses soon thereafter started decorating their brochures and boardroom walls with grandiose mission statements of global aspirations. Mission statement has now become an important part of the strategy-making exercise and managements are taking pains to craft an effective statement. This paper surveys the literature on mission statement, synthesizes various viewpoints about the components of an "ideal" mission statement, and investigates whether mission statement of Indian firms incorporate these components. Content analysis of "mission statements" of a sample of 92 Indian organizationsbanks, software services firms and pharmaceutical firms has been done using nine desired components suggested in literature. The paper compares the mission statements of the three industries and tries to establish relative importance of the components to these industries. Finally, the paper raises some questions on the quality and content of mission statements of Indian organizations.

Warren Bennis, a well-known writer on leadership, says: "To choose a direction, an executive must have developed a mental image of the possible and desirable future state of the organization. This image, which we call a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or a mission statement."

A study of literature on this subject reveals that the vision is widely accepted as the starting point in any strategic planning exercise, followed by a mission. The strategy pyramid in Figure 1 captures the steps involved in the strategy-making process under stable and known industry environments.

Mission Statements-A Hide and Seek Game: What do they Hide within? What do they Seek?,IUP Journal of Business Strategy, strategy-making exercise , Indian firms, organization, industry environments, leadership, mission statements.