I agree they can be very valuable, and like Bosstone’s explanation and examples.
Most of the ones I hear sound empty and of no value other than perhaps a distraction when the emptiness threatens to set the tone all on its own.
For a few of my years in industry our local mission statements made quite a nice difference, but since they have not so much lately, I have substituted the desire to do something I think is useful. It’s comforting to think that much of what humankind has accomplished was without any real statements of mission, or in spite of one.
If you want to take it seriously, a mission statement should be a once sentence summarizing answer to the question “what is it that ya’ say ya’ do here?”
And not to sound too “Good to Great” or anything, but if you really want to get fancy, you can define a Purpose / Vision (where do you see yourself) and Core Values (what do you believe are the key attributes needed to get there) as well.
The problem is that all too often, these things are so vague and nebulous and “MBA speak-y” that they are effectively meaningless. I’ve worked at some companies where they are almost cultlike over their core values and that turns a lot of people off.
Think about your own “mission statement” for your particular career. The most lazy and cynical employee can come up with something like
“To maximimize my compensation while minimizing the actual work I need to perform and agrivation from annoying coworkers and managment.”
So by extension, your Core Values would be something along the lines of:
-Clearly defined responsibilities
-Minimal interaction with others
-High degree of autonomy
-Predictable income stream
So you would use this as a guide in avoiding commission based sales, team-centric jobs, jobs reporting directly to a demanding personality and so on.
Basically it’s just a way of articulating what you want to do.
Mission statements are BS. I’ve seen many come and go.
The most obvious one was Westinghouse’s long-time slogan “Find a need and fill it”
We had some that were the equivalent of “do good things for your customers and then find more customers for what you do well.” Yeah, that’s a lot of help.
One lean year our mission was changed to “Only work on whatever brings in the most money soonest” At least you had it in writing.
Only if the person who wrote it really believe in it and act it out, and this really spread on to others and so on. Acting it out means using the mission statement as the guide for most, if not all, important decisions and relevant minor decisions. An organisation which promotes “honesty and integrity” but shoot down whistleblowers are one example of when a mission statement won’t work.
Edit: And oh yeah, like what Bosstone has said, if the mission statement is not helpful in making any decisions, it’s just BS.
One reason mission statements aren’t particularly useful is that they mostly seem designed to provide patronizing doublespeak to a vast pool of timid, middle class, middle-aged, mediocre, employees possessing average ability. Large corporations are filled with large numbers of regular people who mostly do what they are told by relatively incompetant and uninspiring middle managers and have no real ability to affect change. They live in constant fear of being laid off or transfered across the country on a whim for reasons they don’t comprehend.
So what happens is that there is a cognitive dissonance between what the company says and what it does. For example, referring to employees as a “family” while laying them off. Families don’t get rid of family members who they feel don’t fit it. Or thinking Work / Life Balance means hosting happy hours, dinners, retreats and other activities than force people to spend more time with their coworkers than with outside friends and family. So mission statements, core values, vision statements and other inspirationalisms become so much corporate propoganda.
If you people think business mission statements are a lot of nonsense, go read a school’s mission statement. There is a pretty good chance that it won’t even be intelligible.
I’m not sure how the OP is using the term mission statement. We always followed it up with some other statements with more details, which would cover the types of things you mention.
Product I’ve worked on, and some internal things I’ve been a customer for and signed off on, had marketing statements which explicitly stated how various design tradeoffs would be resolved. In this case it might say whether the product should depend on very high end GPUs or whether it should be targeted to a broader market. That gives more details on the kinds of tradeoffs you implied. Absolutely essential, but definitely not a mission statement.
<In case anyone thinks my example is laughable, my daughter once gave my wife a Desperate Housewifes video game which required a top end GPU. Sure, the average player of that game always has high end gaming machines. :rolleyes:>
In a well run company it can have some purpose, although I wouldn’t say it’s all that critical. My company seems to genuinely believe in and abide by the mission statement. But, my company’s also a not-for-profit corporation, so SmashTheState’s point may apply here; profit isn’t our central purpose. Our mission statement is quite unambiguous and doesn’t have corporate buzzwords.
I recently was thumbing through an old copy of “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” and parts of the book seem comically dated now. There’s a part where Covey talks about how he and his minions went up into the mountains to come up with a mission statement. I can’t recall exactly what it was but it was hilarious in its meaningless buzzspeakery; if you had inserted it into a Dilbert strip mocking mission statements it would have fit right in.
This reminds me of how a company I worked at in the 1980s came up with its mission statement. I won’t get into details, but the analogy likened one of the executroids creating a mission statement to Moses going up Mount Sinai and coming down with the Ten Commandments. Something about that “mountain” metaphor, I guess.
Based on my experience, I think a mission statement can be useful for the reasons cited above: if it clarifies a decision that is to be made or how something is implemented, that seems to me to be what it should be used for. But like many others, I’ve seen far too many mission statements that consist of corporate buzzspeak, but that don’t actually say anything that an ordinary person can understand: “Our mission is to proactively leverage our customer’s expectations in order to supply products and services that create dynamic synergies within an empowered framework on a going-forward basis.”
Maybe executroids should quit going up mountains, and come up with things that are more down-to-earth.
Depends on what kind of paper you use to print the statement. Something soft and absorbent could come in handy in the bathroom. Something very thin might come in handy if someone wanted to roll up something…
Coming to this late, but the thread is not old enough to be considered a Zombie.
I agree with a lot of the POV’s here: many Mission statements are pointless consultant-speak twaddle, but they can be very useful. An employee’s sense of the Mission Statement’s genuine usefulness is likely based on 3 criteria:
Has the company embraced the true purpose of a Mission Statement - is it a plain-spoken, easy-to-remember-and-share phrase or sentence that explains what the company does?
How close is the employee’s role to the core competencies of the company? Roles out on the fringes don’t have the direct focus that core jobs do - so a Mission Statement can seem irrelevant to a Customer Service rep or an Accountant or other staff function that isn’t focused on delivering the company’s core products or services.
What else does the company have in place which shows that it walks the talk? A Mission Statement that is not backed up through action up and down the organization comes across as false and disingenuous. It’s a Catch-22: If you are living the Mission, you arguably don’t need to state it*; if you are not living it, then having a nifty Mission Statement does nothing but point out the gap…
Since many/most companies or roles within companies rate poorly on 1 or more of these, Mission Statements typically get a bad rap…but that rap is indicative of something deeper requiring attention, not simply a dismissal of MStatements as a tool - but most companies can’t or won’t confront that…