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"Like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making" Sam Walton. "Made in America"
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Where To Stick Your Mission Statement ... contd. 12 myths of Highly Successful Companies(From Built To Last) MYTH NUMBER 1. It takes a great idea to start a great company. MYTH NUMBER 2. Visionary Companies require great and charismatic leaders. MYTH NUMBER 3. The most successful companies exist first and foremost to maximize profits. MYTH NUMBER 4. Visionary companies share a common subset of 'correct' core values. MYTH NUMBER 5. The only constant is change. MYTH NUMBER 6. Blue Chip companies play it safe. MYTH NUMBER 7. Visionary companies are great places to work --for everyone. MYTH NUMBER 8. Highly successful companies make their best moves by brilliant and complex strategic planning. MYTH NUMBER 9. Companies should hire outside CEOs to stimulate fundamental change. MYTH NUMBER 10. The most successful companies focus primarily on beating the competition. MYTH NUMBER 11. You can have your cake and eat it too. MYTH NUMBER 12. Companies become visionary primarily through vision statements. So if it's not Mission Statements or charismatic leaders, then what? If you had the unenvious task of doing the hiring for your company, my guess is that you wouldn't give the resume of Steve Case, Akio Morita or Kim Polese a second look --only because they didn't look like they had a 'goal in life'. If you haven't heard of Kim Polese, no problem. She's the girl who couldn't decide whether she ought to find a career in Ice-cream or Software. So she went to Berkley and did bio-physics. There were far too many ice-cream producers and software manufacturers, so she drifted into a category of the internet called "push media", and that too, a bit late. Today Polese's company, Marimba, is staking a piece of real-estate on the Net that giants such as Microsoft are after. How come? My bet is that Marimba would never write it's mission statement in stone. One year from now, it could be chasing after something different entirely. WHAT IF YOU DO HAVE A MISSION STATEMENT?No problem with that at all. It depends on what you do with it. Too often mission statements chase after the gods of profitability, and market share, ignoring the core ideology that drives the business. Other's discover their mission almost by chance. You probably will not recognize the company formerly known as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CRT) that barely made it through the depression. One day in 1924 its owner, Thomas J. Watson decided that his company would give up selling coffee grinders and butcher scales, would be henceforth called International Business Machines Corporation. Suddenly it had a 'mission', leaping ahead later in the 60's to grab the market out of rival Burroughs with the risky new computer called the IBM 360. If you hadn't guessed it, that freight delivery company is today's American Express --a different mission, built around the same reliable worldwide service. In the end discovering one's mission takes time. Sam Walton, often liked to say that the discount store phenomenon Wal-Mart was not something he set out to achieve, but it was 'twenty years in the making'. Smart companies create cult-like corporate cultures around it. Some select employees based on how compatible they would be with it. In advertising, J. Walter Thompson may be no match to the much smaller, but incredibly creative hot-shops springing up everywhere, but it's the undisputed guru of big ideas. JWT is easily the grand-daddy of creativity because it invests large amounts of time and money around its mission in wanting to be the 'university of advertising'. If you're wondering why I'm making a segue into the advertising arena, there's very good reason to it. It's where, as a hapless copywriter, I learned a trick or two about concocting 10-minute mission statements for clients who thought they were a bunch of creative words you neatly typeset and paste-up on the fly-leaf of an annual report, just to impress the investors. Of course, the agency will always trot out it's head wordsmith and oblige, if you ask. At the risk of earning the wrath of every account executive who only seeks to please the client, I would urge that, that be one assignment you don't give your agency. If you really, desperately need one, write one yourself. And once you've got one, where do you stick your mission statement? I can think of one fine place (no it's not where you're thinking) : In the minds of your employees.
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