Aim for the Moon and you might reach the Stars

Abstract: The background to this paper is that that many new founded companies have a problem to achieve such a growth rate that they manage to stay alive their first five years. Only a few of the new started company is able to achieve a rapid growth rate in their early lives. Why is this? And can a vision be the answer? The answer to this is yes, a vision can be the answer. But how shall the vision be implemented in the organization in order to work? With this back ground a question were formulated: “How do small, high growth companies work with their vision?” The study is a case study of a small company in Sweden; company Alpha, who has had a growth rate of over 100 percent per year over the last six years. The company was chosen because of its size and its almost unique way of achieving a high growth rate. From several theoretical references a model were created. This model focuses on four different dimensions that are important in order to work and use a vision within a company. These four aspects were; vision development, vision articulation, and vision communication and vision implementation. The conclusion of the paper is that rapid growth companies work with visions as a tool to attract personal, and stakeholders. They also work with it in a way that the vision becomes a management tool, used for controlling and showing the direction to the employees, making their work, and decision-taking easier. This is a way to make the employees more secure in both their own actions and what to expect of the company. The paper also shows that companies’ works with smaller visions, department visions, in order to easier implement the vision in the day-to-day work.