One of our topics in Ch. 2 is mission statements, and we give examples of three of them we think are good : Merck, Hard Rock Cafe, and Arnold Palmer Hospital. When I cover this material, I usually ask students to each find a concise one of their own to share with the class.
The Wall Street Journal’s (Nov.26,2010) front page article provides a few mission statements that might be a bit clearer. Let me share these with you:
Ingersoll-Rand: “World leader in creating and sustaining safe, comfortable and efficient environments”. Translation: the company makes locks, A/C equipment, and battery-powered golf cars. The chair of the Center for Plain Language responds, “I picture a large swath of Amazonian jungle under the gentle and effective care of Ingersoll-Rand”.
Parker Hannifin: “The global leader in motion and control technologies”. Their main products are pumps and valves. The Journal writes, “the description might equally apply to a maker of lingerie”.
TRW Automative Holdings: “The global leader in active and passive safety”. The rest of us call these brakes and seat belts.
DXP Enterprises: “A leading products and service distributor focused on adding value and total cost savings solutions to MRO and OEM customers in virtually every industry since 1908”. In plainer language, a VP says we distibute “pumps, tools, nuts, bolts and safety supplies such as hard hats”.
Finally, my favorite, Sykes Enterprises: “A global leader in providing customer contact management solutions and services in the business processing outsourcing arena”. Translation: they operate call centers and help desks.
Discussion questions:
1. Why is it so hard to write a good mission statement?
2. What do you do when you are a company like 3M, which makes about 55,000 diverse products?
3. Why is the Arnold Palmer Hospital statement (see Ch.2) so well written?
Like a lot of people, I had to write mission statements for several companies. As an academician, I often get stuck writing them for a department, school, or college. My theory is that people write mission statements because someone tells them they have to write one.
A number of years ago, at a university in Florida, I had the misfortune of being on a committee to write a departmental mission statement. After two days of arguing over a word here and a word there, one of the professors suggested we go on a weekend retreat to finish the job. Luckily, good sense prevailed. (or, was it my threat to boycott the retreat?)
A good friend of mime, who consults for major companies, shared some of the mission statements that employees suggested for their companies. I can only remember one of them. It was from an engineer at IBM. It read, “IBM, where creative people meet, and meet, and meet,…”
Here is a good lesson to students. Just because something has some nice-sounding words doesn’t make it usable, practical, or worth the time it took to put it together. I wish I had a dollar for every useless mission statement in the world. I would not have to spend my time writing these blogs. I would be on a beach, sipping drinks from a coconut.
Wait, is that the beginning of a mission statement?
I agree, a mission statement that is not internalized or is misstated can be a real source of problems for a company. On the one hand, if the mission is not internalized, where employees have the laminated card in their wallet but not a sense of what it means, tends to lead companies to do all types of dysfunctional activities. A misstated mission can be even worse since it leads the company to focus on activities that really don’t drive value for the customer or can lead a company to undertake ventures that spread resources too thin in critical areas.