Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

What Is YOUR Mission Statement?

Bryan Stapp, Loud Amplifier Marketing

I recently attended a conference where Guy Kawasaki challenged the audience to create meaningful “Mantras” for their companies.

He explained how the standard corporate “Mission Statement” really wasn’t cutting it anymore. In describing the process of conducting a two-day offsite meeting with a highly paid consultant to facilitate the flip-chart discussion, he revealed that the Mission Statement Generator on the Dilbert web site actually comes up with some pretty good ones. So good in fact, that a global accounting firm nearly adopted one created on the Dilbert site which was submitted to the company’s internal contest — it won second place. So I tried it for myself and found it works for just about any industry.

For an alternative energy company:

“The customer can count on us to continually engineer world-class services such that we may continue to synergistically network ethical resources while maintaining the highest standards”

For a business services media company:

“It’s our mission to interactively supply scalable resources so that we may endeavor to competently disseminate business materials while maintaining the highest standards.”

How about for a consulting firm:

“We efficiently simplify low-risk high-yield paradigms to allow us to enthusiastically fashion market-driven deliverables to stay competitive in tomorrow’s world”

OK, these are silly and no one in their right mind would ever put out this kind of drivel, right?

Wrong.

Read this ACTUAL mission statement – you will be surprised where it comes from:

“The following six guiding principles will help us measure the appropriateness of our decisions:

Provide a great work environment and treat each other with respect and dignity.

Embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.

Apply the highest standards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting and fresh delivery of our coffee.

Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time.

Contribute positively to our communities and our environment.

Recognize that profitability is essential to our future success.”

This is from Starbucks. Shouldn’t their mission statement be more like “We brew delicious coffee and build friendships”?

Bayer’s mission statement requires a 9-page PDF. I thought they were supposed to get rid of headaches, not give them!

If you want to create a mission statement that actually means something – think about what your company actually provides to the consumer and go from there. You really don’t need to write a manifesto or a behavioral guideline for employees. Just say what you do.

If you want to have some fun, try the Dilbert Mission Statement generator, or the B.S. generator which is really good for generating PowerPoint buzzwords.

Posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 8:38 am and is filed under Business, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.