Mission: Implausible

This post from former corporate CEO John Bell says something true and important about "mission statements," those ubiquitous airy sentences seen on so many letterheads, logos and brochures: Most of them stink.

Bell doesn't argue against the idea of a mission statement, which is in reality what a company, group or department wants to do. As he notes, ExxonMobil's paragraph-long nonsentence would have been better replaced by this: "Our mission is to make a lot of money." Accurate, simple and straightforward. It leaves the strategizing on how to make this money up to the people who work for the company and are supposed to know how to go about it.

Company lawyers say which ways of making money are illegal (Hint: Counterfeiting, developing a petroleum-eating microorganism that will devour the competition's product leaving ExxonMobil with the only source of oil supply in the WORLD, mwah-hah-hah, etc). Company scientists say which ways of making money are impossible (Such as turning dog feces into petrochemical products without the benefit of hundreds of millions of years of pressure and chemical reactions). Company marketers say how to get people to give the company money for the product (Suggested slogan: We're not BP and that ship thing happened a long time ago. Plus, we don't own it anymore anyway).

But Bell says more mission statements are like ExxonMobil's than not, and they leave company employees as well as customers unclear about what the company wants to do. They don't tell employees just what their job does to help the mission or the customer what they may be getting for their money.

At the college where I used to work, we had a spate of mission statementing, strategic planning and tactical objectivizing (I think someone didn't get to play Army enough when he was a kid, and I think that someone was in charge of the school). Our department supervisor loved that sort of stuff, so I believe we spent just shy of six years worth of staff meetings coming up with our mission statement, strategic plan, tactical objectives and whatnot for a department of five people, including the 88-year-old minister's widow who was the chapel secretary. Six people if you count the ten-hour-a-week administrative intern. Of course I'm kidding, we didn't spend six years on it. Just two months.

These sorts of things ought to be simple: This is what we want to do. This his how we want to do it. This is how we'll know if we've done it. But simple doesn't equal "hefty consulting fee," so we get the purple prose of the usual blah-blah-blah that in the end winds up sounding only blah.