As a professional interim who’s been invited onto the board and operated with the senior management teams of many companies I’ve seen my fair share of mission statements and the process of deriving them. For me the process can be somewhat frustrating as I sit listening to grot and nonsense corporate speak.
Take this:
The mission statement should be a clear and succinct representation of the enterprise’s purpose for existence. It should incorporate socially meaningful and measurable criteria addressing concepts such as the moral/ethical position of the enterprise, public image, the target market, products/services, the geographic domain and expectations of growth and profitability
Why should a mission statement incorporate socially meaningful and measurable criteria? Unless it was created as a charity or as a state run social tool it makes no sense! Most organisations are created with one purpose in mind. Profit. Profit is a good cause, not a bad one. It’s a primary cause not secondary one. Many businesses I’ve been involved with espouse all manner of socalistic stakeholder thinking, which violates and blurs the understanding of property rights and redirects managers toward working for a stakeholder collective rather than the actual owners.
Many businesses mission statements fall short because they ignore one basic tenet: A business has only one mission, to bring about economic profit. They produce profits through winning voluntary exchange (sales) because they produce the best alternative for individual decision makers inside their market and because in the mission statements they rarely speak of profits, but that is precisely why they were created. In order to obtain profits they must create things of value, thus, we see firms making products and going so far as changing industries as they continue to search for profits by converting raw materials, be they physical or intellectual, into valued goods and services.
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