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Your company’s vision statement should be a precise, well-crafted document announcing where your company wants to go and painting a picture of what your company wants to become. To people on the inside and outside of your company, your vision statement is a compass, showing the whole world the direction in which your company is heading.

A vision statement not only points the way to the future, but also makes you want to get up and go there. It represents your company’s best hopes and brightest dreams. An insightful corporate vision is much more likely to develop out of a diverse team of hard-working women and men than to spring mysteriously from an inspired moment in the life of a leader.

The best way to create a meaningful vision statement resembles the best way to create a values statement. Just follow these steps:

1 Select a small group of dedicated employees from various levels across your company.If your company is small, get the whole gang together. If you’re the chief cook and bottle washer all in one, you can represent yourself, perhaps recruiting your significant other (or maybe even Mom … OK, not). The more people you involve, the broader the perspective you receive and the better the chances of creating a vision statement that truly reflects your company’s future.

2 Have the group re-read your company’s values statement and review the list of stakeholders, both internal and external, who have an interest in your company.

3 Begin a verbal free-for-all.Allow everybody to volunteer personal opinions and ideas about the company’s future, form, and direction. Start taking down a list and forming it into a cohesive statement.

4 When the vision team feels comfortable with the results, add the finishing touches to get your vision ready for prime time.

Although it may be only a couple of sentences or even just a phrase, the vision statement is the compass that provides your company’s direction into the future. Spend enough time with your statement to make sure that the north on your company compass truly is north — that it does indeed point in the direction in which you want to go.

Brush, rinse, repeat? No. As a rule of thumb, you should assume that your vision statement could serve the company for the next decade. But does this mean that you can never change the statement? Again, no; the disruptive times in which we currently exist has put just about everything in flux. But vision statements are not like your underclothes: you should change it only if business conditions truly warrant a new course of action. Keep in mind that the ideas you capture in your company’s vision statement aren’t meant to be crossed out or rewritten on a whim; they represent the lasting themes that guide your company at any time and under any circumstance.

But only diamonds last forever. If a changing environment throws you an unexpected curve, by all means alter your vision to reflect the new reality. You should craft your statement in such a way that it’s flexible to respond to a changing environment. If the words no longer have meaning for your company, they become useless. Again, the company’s vision statement is useful only to the extent that it has the power to move your people into the future, and words alone rarely do that. So don’t just talk the talk — you also gotta walk the walk.

Money categorizes you. Values define you.