How a Mission Statement Can Kill Your Organization
Jan 27th, 2010 by David Svet
This is the tale of two banks. They both started at about the same time. One of them began as a remarkable idea and the other as a great way to make money. The remarkable bank spent a lot of time during their formation figuring out how to make a significant positive impact on their customers’ lives. The other bank made every effort to keep their overhead as low as they could and to open as quickly as possible.
The remarkable bank developed a strong mission statement that they lived by and used to guide their vision for the future. The other bank pulled their mission statement from another bank’s website. As you can guess, the remarkable bank grew very quickly and was very profitable. It was recently sold at a tremendous premium and the founders were handsomely rewarded for their efforts. The other bank is currently spending a lot of time explaining their actions to federal regulators and the bank is not expected to survive.
This is a true story. The remarkable bank was customer centric and had a very unique value proposition. They had a vision for how they could help their customers and made it their mission to make it happen. Yes, they documented everything in a mission statement and vision statement. But, the documents aren’t what made the difference. They understood the importance of the idea and process of developing them. The result was a unique and very valuable business plan that was executed to perfection.
Take a close look at your organization. If you could put your mission and vision statements on a competitor’s website and it wouldn’t matter, you have a problem. You aren’t remarkable. You have no differential advantage in the marketplace. It’s probably time to look in the mirror and ask some very hard questions about why your organization is here. Don’t stop until you have a good answer.
Image: “Ani and Ani” by Flickr.com user lokate366, under Creative Commons Attribution License. Thank you for sharing this picture, lokate 366.
The only change I’d suggest for this post is to boldface the sentence “If you could put your mission and vision statements on a competitor’s website and it wouldn’t matter, you have a problem.”
Wanting all my Facebook friends to see that, I re-posted it in the Notes section of my FB profile.
Having devoted my career to marketing nonprofit organizations, I’m convinced you could shuffle the mission and vision statements of most organizations and no one would know.
If you can’t differentiate it, you can’t market it.
Done! Thanks, Duane. That’s a great suggestion.
It never ceases to amaze me how little original thought goes in to something so critical. It’s no wonder that the middle of the pack is so large — they all say the same thing.
brill. being familiar with your train of thoughts, must say this post is quite well crafted indeed. so..er..”mission” and “vision”? sounds so 80’s.. (trust you’re well ; ) a
Thanks, Autom. I appreciate the compliment.
Yeah, mission and vision sound very earth crunchy. But, it is important to get it nailed down. Most organizations work on a vision just for their organization. What they need to do is develop of vision of how the world will be as a result of their success and work backward to create a mission that can fulfill the vision. Then they have to live it!
If you don’t have a vision statement for your own product than there is a HUGE PROBLEM. Stealing one isn’t going to make your product any better and you aren’t going to be able to replicate the culture of an organization. You could try and try but it will never be the same. You need to know what your goals are and why you are trying to achieve them and that isn’t by copying someone else’s ideas. How is that good for you or your customer’s? It not only is bad practice but sets a bad example for everyone.