[I am mad mad mad at myself that I had a wonderful example and good points to make and forgot them before I got to this blog.]
It is understood that such a statement serves the purpose of marketing the company image (or what they call 'informing') customers and on the other side to 'inform' stakeholders, management and the like.
In general, a mission statement has to be clear, concise, understandable. Also what I read around that it should be centered around clients.
What I really want to talk about though is another site of the mission statement - the motivational, the directional. A mission statement should be written in such a way that it can relate to every action of an employee or management. It has to make people want to work for the company and give them a sense of direction and meaning. "Provide the best quality socks to our clients" doesn't really make the line of motivation and direction in life. Rather, I would have a mission statement appreciated even by people that DO NOT need the services of that company. More like, "Warm up people's hearts by providing peoples with socks" If you have people united around a more noble idea, then this will flow through the arteries of the organization to the smallest task. Employees will start to do what they do differently without even realizing it...
So let's hop on to the real world. One of my favorite mission statement is Google's, "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." As you can see it doesn't say, "We want to organize our client's information and make it accessible" but they rather submit to a more noble cause that triggers an inside feeling of support.
So...direction and motivation is what my company's mission statement will be good at.
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2 comments:
I definitely agree! The mission statement should motivate. Like I said in my post about mission statements, it has to be optimistic, yet obtainable, as well. So that the company and it's employees can strive higher, even if they have already dominated the industry, like Google.
They should always be innovating. That's why the mission statement should reflect that and influence that through motivational statements, just like "organize the world's information" and not "organize our client's information." It is very important that the employees of the company feel support for what they strive to do.
Hey, I liked your approach to describing a mission statement, I was locked in the four parts of mission statement as describe in Prof. Booke and Prof. Parthasarthy's Strategic Management book, but i think you are 100% correct, in the same way in which a leader in the Armed Forces has to keep troops motivated, maintaining a high morale to continue with the mission in a combat situation no matter the obstacles and constrains, a company's mission statement should make the employees want to get up every morning to be part of something positive, meaningful, and rewarding.
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