A couple of years ago, I downloaded for my Palm a small shareware program called “Dilbert’s Mission Statement Generator.” At the click of a button, it would spit out an utterly incomprehensible mission statement, much like the ones I’ve seen generated over the years by corporate offices and nonprofit boards. A good example: “The customer can count on us to synergistically engineer market-driven intellectual capital for 100% customer satisfaction.”

You can generate your own at www.dilbert.com.

One organization where I was an employee spent thousands of dollars on consultants, and many months tying up staff time, trying to determine its mission statement. Ironically, by the end of the process, it ended up with a new mission statement that departed from the original one by about eight words.
Needless to say, this was a bit of a frustrating process for everyone involved. Also needless to say, you don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in a long drawn out process trying to determine the precise of your mission.

Some years before that, I was doing technical support for the State Department as an employee of a large beltway bandit corporation which will go unnamed, since they can certainly afford better lawyers than I can. In any event, one day all fifty some odd thousand employees of this big company (we’ll call it Greed, Inc. for convenience’s sake) had to sit down and watch this video of the new CEO describing the new mission statement of the company.

Let me tell you how excited we all were. For forty minutes, we listened (or didn’t) to incomprehensible gobbledygook, a description of how the company was really a three-legged-stool (what the hell does that mean?) and on and on and on…. I can’t remember most of it, though I paid attention dutifully, because it was hard to hear over the rest of the team snoring.

That’s not what I have in mind here when I talk about mission statements.

Mission statements are actually very important. Too many people launch into the process of trying to organize without having a clear idea of what it is they are trying to accomplish. It’s easy to spot an injustice, but sometimes difficult to be precise about how you are going to address it.

If you are just getting started, keep it simple.

You have basically two questions to answer:

What are you trying to accomplish?

How are you going to do it?