1. How would you describe the way vision was used at Mentor Graphics?
2. Did it strengthen or weaken the company? How? Why?
3. Of the reasons discussed in this chapter concerning why visions fail, which are appli- cable to Mentor Graphics?
4. What is your assessment of the vision content and the process through which it was intro- duced in the Mentor Graphics context? What lessons emerge from your assessment? 5. Based on what happened at Mentor Graphics, what are the implications for the three debates discussed in this chapter: whether vision drives change or emerges during change; whether vision helps or hinders change; and whether vision is an attribute of heroic leaders or heroic organizations?
Case
Gerard Langeler (1992), president of Mentor Graphics Corporation, described the role of vision in his company over a decade. Formed in the early 1980s, Mentor Graphics started with an unarticulated vision to "Build Something That People Will Buy." On this basis, they spent a number of months interviewing potential customers and designing a computer-aided engineering workstation product. At the same time, a competitor, Daisy Systems, was engaged in the same task and, in the early years, outcompeted Mentor Graphics. Eventually, "Beat Daisy" became the new vision, driven by the need to survive as a business. By 1985 Mentor's revenues were higher than Daisy's; their vision had been real- ized. The company continued to grow despite the recession, but it suffered from typical growth problems, including decline in product quality and problems of internal company coordination. Stock value also suffered, and a number of staff approached Langeler seek- ing a new vision for the company. The new vision was developed based on "Six Boxes," which represented the six differ- ent businesses in which the company sought market leadership. The "Six Boxes" became a company mantra, but in the late 1980s, one of the businesses, computer-aided pub- lishing, was not paying dividends. However, the fact that it constituted one of the "Six Boxes" meant that they could not shut it down, and be left with a "Five Boxes" vision. In this case, the existence of the vision disrupted the ability to make sound financial judge- ments. It also stopped them from moving more quickly to using Sun platforms, some- thing they thought was too conventional for them. A new vision was developed-the "10X Imperative"-that mirrored the push other companies were making toward quality through Six Sigma and other similar quality pro- grams. However, customers did not really understand the new vision: it was too abstract and elusive. In 1989 yet another vision emerged: "Changing the Way the World Designs Together." In retrospect, Langeler depicts this vision as "the final extension of vision creep that began with Six Boxes." It was very grand and had little to do with the actual businesses in which Mentor Graphics operated, including the development of its new 8.0 generation of software. The realization, by the early 1990s, that the company's vision detracted from what the company was actually trying to achieve led to the dumping of the vision and its replace- ment with one that echoed the early beginning of the company: "Our current short-, medium-, and long-term vision is to build things people will buy." This was seen as a more pragmatic vision for a company that had lost its way, caught up in a cycle of visions that were increasingly irrelevant to the core business and which inhibited their ability to make sound business decisions.