Vision has a bad name, and it has earned it. Too often it arrives as a slide: a sentence about being the leading, trusted, customer-centric something, polished by committee until it could belong to any company on earth. That kind of vision is decoration. But the cure for a useless vision is not no vision. It is a vision that does an actual job.
A vision is a decision aid
The test of a vision is practical: does it help someone choose? When two reasonable options sit on the table and you are not in the room, the vision should tip the call. If it cannot resolve a real trade-off (speed versus quality, this market versus that one), it is not steering anything. It is wall art with good intentions.
A vision you cannot use to settle an argument is not a vision. It is a mood board with a budget.
Pragmatism and vision are not enemies
It is fashionable to say pragmatism beats vision, and against the slide version, it does. But the dichotomy collapses once the vision is doing work. Pragmatism without direction is busy drift: a thousand sensible local decisions adding up to nowhere. Direction without pragmatism is a poster. The vision says where; pragmatism decides the next step. Neither is sufficient alone.
Make it concrete enough to refuse things
A real vision excludes. It tells you what you will not do, which customers you will not chase, which good ideas do not belong here. A vision that excludes nothing commits to nothing. The fastest way to test yours is to ask what it rules out. If the honest answer is "nothing, really", you have a slogan, and a slogan cannot carry the weight you are about to put on it.
Stop writing visions to be admired. Write them to be used: to settle the small arguments, every day, in rooms you will never attend.