Developing a foundation for strategy at Seagate Software

Seagate Software provides tools and applications for managing and accessing information. In 1995, Seagate Technology began building the company using a strategy of acquiring software companies with synergistic products for information, network, and storage management. After over a dozen acquisitions, it needed to integrate them into a single company with a common vision and a shared sense of values. To help, Seagate used value-focused thinking to create and organize a complete set of company objectives based on discussions with key individuals, originally from several different acquired companies. The discussions also provided a list of issues and decision opportunities to address. Seagate used the objectives as a foundation for talking about the desired properties of vision and mission statements and creating several possibilities for each. The process and the resulting vision and mission statements contributed to creating a single company with clear, agreed-upon direction.