Getting Mission Statements and About Us Pages Off The Information Blacklist
Don't tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.
—James W. FrickAction expresses priorities.
—Charles A. Garfield
Here’s a mission statement from an actual strategic planner: “[our firm] uses a strategic planning process to help management teams focus on their most significant opportunities.” Is this information or not? They use a strategic planning process … fine, but who in this particular business doesn’t? "Significant opportunities" mean nothing. Are there those in this industry who focus on, say, insignificant opportunities? Could anything this person did ever be “off mission?” If there is no practical way to be off your mission, it might stand to reason you aren’t even on one.
To have information value, strategic planning should mean comparative advantage against competition. …Employee attraction, retention, and a solid grasp of strategic direction. …Management headaches minimized. …Increased lifetime value of customers. In Management needs fewer fads, more reflection Pfeffer and Sutton make a critical contextual observation, “Organizations can have amazingly good evidence, but it has no effect on the decisions they make if it conflicts with their ideology.” Unfortunately the mission statement is often the only strategic planning document affording an organization the opportunity to influence ideology and organization culture.
It’s all well and good one dotcom wants to “ …become a leading B2B provider of online and wireless contact management / communication applications for use by businesses, ISPs and portals worldwide,” as one company Web site boldly announces. Isn’t every company trying to be number one?
Not always. Avis carved out a niche, both internally and externally by being number two. The underdog role provides a lot more context for decision making. Companies can develop a reputation as a fast follower and innovative counter strategist. More often being number one in quality is the strategy, as long as it does’t interfere with tactical priorities of shipping product. And the mission statement gathers dust because it has no relationship to action.
Action As Information
A survey of 336 companies revealed that only one–third of employees are fully engaged and know their employers’ missions. The survey shows the main reason employees are disengaged is due to their employers’ failure to communicate organizational strategies.
— Employees Unaware Of Company Strategies; IndustryWeekHere’s a personal mission statement: “To help individuals and organizations understand their potential and assist them in doing what’s necessary to turn that potential into actions resulting in the achievement of their goals.” I’ll save you some time: Not information. Such a statement could apply to any philosophy, career, or style of priority setting. The fact a career counselor (with a newspaper column) uses it is troubling. Such vagueness supports indecision, activity for the sake of activity, and priorities which shift and multiply constantly. Vague missions are ideal as distraction from what’s far more informative about what kind of decisions you can expect.
When mission statements are not the information which guides action, tasks become ends unto themselves. Where producing the mission statement is merely a creative writing exercise, what management does becomes more informative than what is said. Factions and silos within the organization are the context for decisions in the best interest of each fiefdom. Products, services and policies contradict as often as support branding, which then seems superficial. With the mission statement a fond abstraction, nothing can credibly be mission critical.
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, LLP is different, and they will tell you why on their web site. The central question surfers ask is “I have looked at five or ten other law firms so far, why should I hire you?” The page is about why you should hire Quinn Emanuel as your law firm, not about content as filler. Content isn’t king, information is.
The difference between what what computers spew out daily and meaningful information is human action. And genuine information technologies look so unlike anything discussed by an IT department I doubt today’s CIOs would even recognize them.
The bottom of every Granite Rock invoice reads, “If you are not satisfied for any reason, don’t pay us for it. Simply scratch out the line item, write a brief note about the problem, and return a copy of this invoice along with your check for the balance.” …Customers do not need to return the product. They do not need to call and complain. They have complete discretionary power to decide whether and how much to pay based on their satisfaction level.
— Turning Goals Into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms
Show me how and where your organization spends its money and I’ll show you the defacto mission statement driving decision making. Show me your company website, invoices, and what employee reviews praise, reward and punish, and I’ll write out the mission statement you’re broadcasting to everyone your company interacts with. It really doesn’t matter whether you write a formal mission out or not.
Mission Into Information: Technical Services
The common refrain is “Hey, there’s no mission, no information. I sell computer consulting services. What I do is standards based, it can’t be any different from anyone else. Potential customers either know what I do or they don’t consider themselves potential customers. End of story.” The Geek Squad seems to think it is only the beginning of the story…
The Geek Squad does computer consulting better, faster, and cheaper because we have standardized procedures. Our agents are trained in–house for a minimum or 30 days before they are allowed to tag along on jobs. Until they pass our tests, they don’t even touch a client’s machine.
We’re famous for returning calls in four to seven minutes, 24 hours a day. We charge $75 an hour, or an emergency rate of $150 an hour. But we’ll help the guy at the three–day convention whose laptop won’t charge and who needs it to make sales.
Our clients are about 35 percent residential; the rest are conglomerates like General Mills, Cargill, and 3M. Sure, these billion-dollar businesses have hundreds of engineers and MIS departments—but they’re very busy. …Now, these MIS people call us to make them look good. We go in stealth mode to the internal user, fix the problem, and leave. The higher–ups think the MIS department solved the problem.
This statement of mission wasn’t found on the geeksquad.com website, but through more time–consuming means. That information crucial to the customer decision making process is not on a web site is disturbing enough. When you practically have to socially engineer basic information out of a company as if it were some kind of secret is worse. This is no way to run an information age.
Everybody is for nice sounding generalities …just try to get someone to return a call in seven minutes. Mission statements aren’t feel–good affirmations of personal worth. A mission statement is not internally–directed public relations. Only when missions relate to strategies and tactics — down to how phones are answered or the mundane company invoice — can they be removed from the information blacklist.
Related Articles:
Resources
- Mantras Versus Missions is Guy Kawasaki’s alternative to meaningless mission statements and motivating employees with catchy slogans.
- iPhone Launch, AT&T Vs. Apple Store describes how action becomes your defacto mission statement, right down to the phonebook sized billing statement.
- Are your Employees Unaware Of Company Strategies?
- Smash the bottle and the iconic package design of a Coke bottle can still be identified from the pieces. Jumble the pieces of a box of Tide and most people still identify it in tests. Smash your web site asks if the components of your web design reflect your mission, or send an unintended but far more informative message.
- Jim Collins explains how missions statements merely articulate the relationship of values to action. Being on a mission is a process of detecting misalignment and creating new actions which reaffirm core values. The mission statement examples Collins cites have an alignment “mechanism with teeth.”
- Ben & Jerry’s mission statement has three (explicit) dimensions. It is not three missions, but the same mission seen from three contexts. What the business does can be traced back to what is in the mission. Business decisions can either fit or be a mismatch to what is in the mission. In other words the mission can inspire and guide the decision to act. Entrepreneur magazine charts what happens when the mission statement is simply a creative writing exercise, not a living information document.
- One of the better About Us examples is this hosting provider. The reason is it addresses what they consider misconceptions in deciding on performance. I would suggest going further, to address the methodology for handling requests or complaints and service performance in addition to how the technology performs.
- The J. Peterman Catalog (yes there’s a real one) can not be described using the word content. In articulating the philosophy on the front of the catalog, it ranks highly among any list of mission statement examples. What attracts customers and employees also forms a context for evaluating products for the catalog. And catalog entries are just as much evidence of, and feedback tools for evaluating the mission. An example of a mission–driven organization which can list their mission as an asset.
- InfoWorld Columnist Bob Lewis suggests IT and MIS mission statements center around a hypocaloric hypergustation modality. Doing the information work Lewis translates techspeak to “Tastes great, less filling” as the idea IT departments should design mission statements around. This MIS Magazine article suggests projects align with the mission statement. And while entirely too clever for its own good, the geeksquad site weaves a distinctive identity design in with their mission statement.
- Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, conducted a simple test. Calling himself a consultant named Mebert, Adams created a ridiculous history of accomplishments for the assembled company executives. He then proceeded to construct a meaningless mission statement for what is, by all accounts, a smart technology company. Adams’ test created an information backchannel. A tool British Airways and other companies are using to debug information systems, instead of technology systems. Jim Collins calls them red flag mechanisms for turning what passes for information into actual information.
- Since this site gets some traffic from people looking for the British Airways mission statement, let us focus on the B.A. mission, (or what little I could find about it). Then check out what others have to say about vision statements from the industry in general.
- Many mission statement examples checked this way would reveal undefined words with no agreed upon meanings. And so no tactical counterpart in services or products.
- Most personal mission statement examples sound like a bad beauty contestant speech mixed in with sitcom self help guru affirmations. One of the very few designed to change action to reach mission objectives concerns writing up a performance agreement and evaluation criteria.
- Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, LLP About Our Firm page. One out of two hundred sites even comes close to the basic information found here, far fewer equal it. When it isn’t on a site, often it is missing from product or service descriptions, print materials, and most assuredly the actual business processes and products. You simply don’t gain tactical advantage from “We listen,” or nice sounding buzzwords strung into quasi–sentences.
- Most Products and Service Brands Commoditizing, Not Differentiating, Reports New Copernicus-Market Facts’ Study 51 Product categories studied. Billions spent branding, and yet few of the targets of branding efforts can tell one product from another. Should you need data to explain how this information vacuum might matter to your company, I would start here. Would–be information workers can entertain the idea information allows you to distinguish the difference between having a mission statement and the action of being on a mission.
- Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, July 22, 2001: Tagline Blues: What’s the Site About? Nielsen takes on several big tech sites for meaningless taglines. Interesting that tech (infotech?!) dominates the bad examples, though. Netmechanic has a nice article about constructing taglines with good tagline examples.
- Infographics can show how the existing business moves to a mission driven business model. You can find an on site example called Infographics, Exploring Visual Information Design.