Mission Statements

From time to time, people ask me why anyone bothers writing mission statements, given that these documents usually serve no purpose beyond making senior management feel as if they are accomplishing something. If you’ve ever seen one of those corporate mission statements that goes on for two or three pages and does not actually say anything, you already know what I’m talking about. Scott Adams does a really good riff about this in ”The Joy of Work”, one of the Dilbert non-fiction books. During the development of the book, Mr. Adams actually masqueraded as a management consultant (under the name “Ray Mebert”) and tried to get a major American company to write a new mission statement comprised entirely of buzzwords and nonsense.

Needless to say, he succeeded.

The truth is that starting in the early 1990s business schools (and people from them) came into vogue in the United States, and a lot of executives facing increased pressure from the competition began looking to formal management practices in an effort to gain an advantage, or at least convince their corporate board that they had one. One of the “magic bullets” to emerge from this period was the mission statement. Many companies became convinced that if they just wrote the perfect mission statement, everything else about their business would fall into line.

Unfortunately, the mission statement is just a tool, and like most tools, is not much help unless you know how to use it. A hammer will not help you to drive nails if you just purchase it and then leave it sitting on the porch, and a circular saw can’t cut planks and timbers to the right length if you never buy any planks or timbers. Similarly, it’s not that mission statements have no value; the problem is that the people promoting them have no idea how to use them. Or even what they are…

For the record, a mission statement is simply the answer to a question; that question being “What are we doing?” If our mission is to make the best available lawn frog (like a lawn gnome, only it’s a frog) at the best price, then our mission statement should say that. “Our mission is to offer the best possible lawn frogs at the best possible price.” Or perhaps we ought to be a bit more general: “Our mission is to offer consumers the highest quality lawn statuary and the greatest possible value.” Simple, isn’t it? Something anybody should be able to grasp, and even people with expensive business degrees and really tiny brains should be able to come up with.

In my business plan writing classes, students would often ask me if they had to write a formal mission statement, and if so, did they have to include it in the business plan? My response has always been that you don’t have to write a mission statement down anywhere; you don’t have to publish it or even share it with the public. But if you can’t answer the question, “What is it that our business is trying to do?” you’re going to have difficulty accomplishing much of anything, and if you can’t explain what you’re trying to accomplish, no one is likely to give you capital to start up or expand a company…