Getting mission statements right | MBA Learnings

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Kellogg
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First-year student Rohan Rajiv is blogging once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. Read more of his posts here.

We recently looked at a few mission statements in our Values Based Leadership class:

  • Wal-Mart: We save people money so they can live better.
  • Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad: Our vision is to realize the tremendous potential of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway by providing transportation services that consistently meet our customers’ expectations.
  • Dow Chemical: To constantly improve what is essential to human progress by mastering science and technology.

As we went through these statements, our comments were around the following ideas:

  • The Wal-Mart mission is really concrete. It is the sort of statement that can be used whenever Wal-Mart faces a tough decision. Any product or personnel decision could be brought back to the fact that Wal-Mart exists to save people money.
  • The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad mission felt like a non-mission statement. You could easily replace their name and industry with a different company and industry and it could still “work.” That’s a problem.
  • Dow Chemical did very well on inspiration. But, how concrete is it? Can the mission statement actually be used in daily decision making?

Bringing it all together, we realized that great mission statements have two characteristics:

INSPIRATION.
Some inspire with a transcendent purpose and others inspire with a bold goal. Regardless, the inspiration factor gives people a reason to come to work everyday.

CONCRETENESS.
Concreteness makes the vision easy to understand and apply to daily decisions.

Mission statements, as a result, are an important, and yet often neglected resource for building culture, improving employee motivation and decision making. What is an example of a great mission statement?

I love Amazon’s statement – “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.” Really inspiring and yet very concrete. If there was ever a decision to be made, it is clear that the customer would be first priority.

(Note: I’ve used mission and vision statements interchangeably to convey the larger point.)

This learning had immediate applicability for me. I thought of three teams I am working with and thought about the various levels of clarity in our purposes. And voila, it turned out that the team where I felt most stuck was the one with the least clarity around the mission statement.

It is a relatively simple fix. And it is one we ought to get right.

Rohan Rajiv is a first-year student in Kellogg’s Full-Time Two-Year Program. Prior to Kellogg he worked at a-connect serving clients on consulting projects across 14 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. He blogs a learning every day, including his MBA Learnings series, on www.ALearningaDay.com.