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"Mission Statements are not a bunch of creative words you
neatly typeset on the fly-leaf of an annual report, just to impress the investors."
Published in April '96
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Where to stick your Mission Statement
Empowering your
employees takes more than a well-crafted Mission Statement.
Check
your mission statement. That's right. Put down whatever you're doing and go read your
mission statement. You don't think your company has one? That's fine. Most employees
haven't a clue as to what it is. But if you ask your boss, he (or she) will have one ready
for you before you can say 'company profile'.
In the Dilbert comic strip, one character puts together an alphabet soup of words that
read "let's form proactive synergy restructuring teams" and gives it to Dilbert
who gives it to his secretary to type. Like most secretaries who are some of the few
people left on this earth who don't buy this mumbo jumbo, she types : "let's form
protein symphony reactionary teens". Copies of this are circulated to every cubicle
whose inhabitants promptly drop it in the waste paper basket.
Not that this surprises. Does anyone actually understand, follow or let alone
read Mission Statements? My guess is that people take Mission Statements as seriously as
smokers take the Surgeon's General Warning on their pack of cigarettes. The point I'm
trying to make is that we are so inoculated against reading such nonsense that no one
really takes it seriously--except perhaps the wordsmith who created it. I know a lot of
CEOs will dismiss this as rubbish, but stick with me here before I throw some research at
you.
Mission Statements are often not worth the paper they are written on. They
reflect the ideology of upper management, rather than the idiom of the worker on the shop
floor. (see David Weinberger
of Cluetrain Manifesto fame.) I bet some of you are wondering
how this hypothesis fits in with the seemingly impeccable corporate success stories of
Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Walt Disney or Rupert Murdock. In my defense, let's try this:
Write down the present name of the 85 year-old company that once sold clocks and measuring
scales. Also, while you're at it, which company having a household name in the financial
world, began as a freight delivery firm? Take a wild guess. No luck? Here's a clue: One is
in the information business, while the other's name is almost synonymous with cashless
transactions. Amazing as it may seem, both companies did not have anything close to a
Mission Statement when they set out to do business. I'm sorry, but you'll have to wait for
the answer buried somewhere in this article.
So what's the difference between a Mission, a Vision, a Credo, and a Game
Plan? It's purely semantic. Today with people making a business out of writing up snazzy
SWOT analyses and wicked Mission Statements, it really doesn't make a difference what you
call it. It's what you do with it. In Built To Last, authors James
C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras base their observations on a 6-year Stanford University
study they did to understand what makes a truly exceptional company. Unlike most business
school handbooks choc-a-bloc with buzzwords that set out to tell you something earth
shattering, the central point of Built To Last is that many of
the new-age management methods are regurgitated, re-engineered, rediscovered old hat. And
that's what's earth shattering. Like the natural products industry that suddenly
discovered the shocking potency of herbs and Ayurveda, these are things you always knew
that come repackaged as glib phrases or posh initials ('Continuous Improvement', and
'TQM', for instance). So no, there are no visionary leaders. There is no such thing as a
visionary product concept, or a visionary marketing insight. Corporate Vision? pooof! Did
you know that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had no clue about what they could market? Sure
their clock drive for a telescope, and another odd device that could make an urinal flush
automatically ( yes, HP could
have been in the urinal business!) must have been cutting edge at that time. But can you imagine what HP would
have been had its Mission Statement read something like "Our corporate mission is to
technologically enhance the concept of waste water drainage management, and add
state-of-the-art qualitative improvements to optical instruments in the advancement of
astronomy"? Good grief! There's no hint of laser printing technology in that is
there? Which is exactly the point the writers make--that companies start out without a
clue as to what they might achieve.
IF SONY WERE A PERSON, WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD IT BE?
I would be exaggerating to say that every successful company today had no
idea of it's corporate goals. To be sure Federal Express had one, but guess what? Sony
never set out thinking, "hey, guys, let's miniaturize every conceivable piece of
consumer electronics that's invented in America! " Akio Morita is known to have admitted how when he joined Sony
in 1945, they sat around for weeks trying to figure out what they could get into, to make
some money. Not only did they not have a mission statement (They
now have one -- a very long one!), they didn't have a product concept, for goodness
sake! Then there is the 3M company which makes anything from aeronautic adhesives to
Post-It Notes, which began life as a mining company (Yes, the initials of the world's
largest adhesive company actually stands for Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing). So
myth number 1 of highly successful companies is that they all began with a novel product
concept. The reality, say the authors, is that this is more the exception than the rule.
They list eleven other myths that are so shocking that they're worth recounting.
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