Business-type people: Of what use is the mission statement? How important is it?
I remember almost 10 years ago the big company I worked for had a 10 day retreat for their officers to craft the new mission statement. I viewed it as a holiday for the bigwigs.
So I have to ask, do you think it adds value? In what ways? Add any other commentary on mission statements you would like to make.
Absolutely no importance at all. I have never heard a non-management person refer to one as anything other than ridiculous - with the possible exception of sucking up to a management-type during reviews or such.
Ours is something like “We pursue excellence” - which I always interpret as “Excellence will always have us in its rearview mirror!”
It’s kind of like the preamble to the US Constitution. It’s pretty but it has no authority in law.
From my experience mission statements have value with very small businesses starting out. They owners aren’t yet greedy and have somewhat high ideals, which of course errode with time and/or profits.
A mission statement is to a company what a Twinkie is to nutrition.
I don’t think the end result of the mission statement is that important, but in some cases the process of putting one together may be.
Case in point: A while back I was doing some work for an international organization which has been mentioned on this board more than once (for reasons which will become clear, I won’t mention the name). About two years ago, their Board of Directors announced with much fanfare that they were going to “update” their mission statement. When the statement finally did appear, it was BAD: half empty suit posturing, half creepy near-cult-like praise of the weird organizational structure which had been foisted on them by their Svengali consultant/President’s alleged lover (yes, seriously). Later on I talked to a couple of Board members who said that the discussions on the mission statement–well, actually, the Svengali consultant and his inner circle wrote it, then told everyone else “you can approve this or quit”–had been the turning point in realizing that, “Wow, this is one fucked-up place.”
Can’t wait for this place to go bankrupt so I can spill the beans on it. It’s amazing how an organization this well-known can be as crazy as it is.
Visioning exercises are probably more important for charitable NGOs than businesses for the simple reason that every business has the same mission statement: make money. Everything else is just frosting on the capitalist cake. In fact, corporate law makes it a crime for a company’s board to pursue any goal except naked profit.
No value whatsoever. Completely worthless.
Now, a one, two, or three word mission statement is usually called something else, and that might be somewhat worthwhile, to keep you on track.
I don’t know; it depends on how the mission statement is defined and used. Take two software companies, both of which create accounting software. One’s mission statement is “Create the most user-friendly and accessible software possible,” while the other’s statement is “Create the most powerful software possible.” During the development process, the designers and managers may come to a crossroads where they have to decide how to implement certain features or even just what features to implement. The mission statement can provide guidance on which road to take; the first company make work harder than the second to create a really nice user interface, while the second concentrates on getting as many tools and features into the software as possible, with user interface being an afterthought.
Similarly, two companies might have “Provide the best customer experience possible” and “Provide the lowest costs possible.” Different aspects of business to focus on.
Now, obviously, the mission statement can just be some meaningless grab bag of buzzwords thought up by some stuffed-shirt marketing “genius” who thinks he’s smarter than he really is. But it is possible to create a simple statement that defines the company’s intent and provides guidance to its employees in deciding policy and implementation.
Huh. On review, apparently I’ve got a really narrow idea of what constitutes a useful mission statement. 
I think mission statements are more important for guidelines for upper management in creating strategy. If the statement is, “to create superior software” and the VP of Operations wants to acquire a farm, then that doesn’t align with what they are doing.
And as someone else mentioned, important for investors and startups ‘this is what we do’, ‘this is who we want to be’ ‘this is how we are going to get there’
This. And not just in extremely screwed up situations like the one described, but in any organization that needs consensus on what it should be concentrating on (which is only a small percentage of organizations at any time).
Non-profits are most likely to be in this situation, both because they have more options on what to focus on, and because typically many more people need to be part of the consensus for the organization to function well.
The problem is usually that too many participants see their task as “Writing a Mission Statement” (and therefore arguing endlessly over particular words) rather than “Creating a Consensus about the Mission.”
I could see that. But IME, mission statements are hollow, lowest-common-denominator, ultrabland bloviations that are honored, if at all, in the breach.
I once took a course taught by Harvard Biz School profs. One went around to everyone asking them to say what their center/company did in one sentence. That’s the best mission statement.
In my experience, if your company is spending a lot of time writing mission statements (unless it is very new) it is time to dust off your resume. I was at Intel at the height of the fad and there was absolutely no talk of mission statements. Everyone knew what we did without a few days worth of meetings and lots of bullet points.
In my career working in for-profit businesses, I have never found a mission statement to be useful. Likewise, I have never found the lack of a mission statement to be a problem. I have never seen anyone indicate that they made a decision based on a mission statement, or that they would have done so if such a statement existed.
My take on mission statements is that there are two ways to use them: decoration or foundation.
As decoration, the mission statement is meaningless and useless. You’ve simply added it on top of an existing structure and it’s that structure that defines what gets done and how. Maybe the mission statement represents an attempt to change corporate culture that has been less than 100% successful, or maybe it represents outright dishonesty or wishful thinking.
As foundation, the mission statement is very meaningful and useful. You use it to build the structure that then defines the smaller details of the company. The mission statement in the foundational sense is a useful guide to company structure and policies and helps to help employees deal with confusing situations.
One of the things I sometimes recommend to my clients is that they keep the mission statement a secret from customers. By doing that, they remove the temptation to make it a marketing ploy and can focus on what they really want to accomplish. I think this is one reason non-profits often have more useful mission statements. Without the profit motive, the statement they publish is more likely to be honest.
Mission statements *can *be useful, but most are pretentious garbage.
I worked for a start-up once. I proposed that our mission statement be “Take the company public in three years.” We all knew that’s what we were trying to do and being up-front and blunt about it would have made it easier to make a lot of decisions down the road: “Will taking on this project help us take the company public in three years? No? Well let’s not do it then.”
Instead senior management insisted on some silly claptrap that everyone promptly ignored.:rolleyes:
When it comes to designing custom software, I found mission statements invaluable. One of the things you can aways count on when you’re gathering requirements is scope creep, and eventually you get the specs for the perfect application that does absolutely everything for everybody. Our first order of business was to create a two or three line concrete mission statement that just defined what the software was supposed to do. It helped keep both us and the client on track, and when someone said, “Oh, and it should make coffee and give back rubs!” it was much easier to say, “Sorry, not in the mission statment.”
Not that a mission statement was a panacea to scope creep, but it helped head it off at the pass.
I’ve never seen the term mission statement applied to a product. It’s always been the mission of an organization. If you translated the mission statements I’ve suffered through to a game, say, it would be “to provide the best entertainment experience for males from 16 - 25” or something equally helpful.
Totally agree with this.
Used to think of mission statements as useless until I started seeing cases where an employee had to make a decision as to which direction to go in - and having a mission statement can be a good guide.
In some jobs, I think, they are completely useless. In cases where the employees responsibility is to plug this into that, or some other prescribed-process job - the mission statement is arbitrary.
You give a good example why most mission statements, in my experience, are not helpful. It has to be detailed enough to actually say something, yet broad enough to allow for creativity. To follow through on your example for a game, a better mission statment might be something like, "Incorporate the latest CGI techniques within the capabilities of current desktop hardware to create a first-person-shooter with a mature and detailed story line based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, " or even “Story will always be more important than effects.” In other words, you have to give the designers some direction. “The best entertainment experience” is too nebulous and open to too many interpretations.
It’s like that Objective line on resumes that’s being phased out. It’s too easy to come up with some BS that’s too vague to be meaningful, but if you can narrow it enough, it can be a very strong, useful statement.