A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
—Henry Ford, as quoted in the Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal (August 3, 1965)
Most people aren’t working for just a paycheck. In an economy in which highly skilled team members have so many options, they are effectively volunteering to work for one company or another. As they consider their choices, they ask themselves: Does this work matter? Is it consistent with my values? Does it have meaning?
Research shows that when team members believe in the mission of the organization, they perform better. Working alongside people who find meaning in their work is also more fun for everyone. Mission statements alone won’t spark this emotional connection, but done well, they can be a useful tool.
For evidence of this, recall a story from the 1960s. With great fanfare, President Kennedy had announced before Congress a new mission for the Space Race: To “land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth” by the end of the decade. Not long after making that announcement, Kennedy made his first visit to NASA headquarters. During the tour, according to an unverified, but oft-repeated story, Kennedy encountered a janitor working quietly in a hallway and stopped to introduce himself. “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy,” the president said. “What are you doing?” The janitor replied, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”1 Because this worker had internalized the transcendent mission of his organization, he found even the quotidian task of cleaning the floors meaningful—a part of the Herculean task of getting men into space. Wouldn’t you want the lowest-level employee in your organization feeling that same sense of pride and focus?
Part of the job of an entrepreneurial leader is to formulate and articulate this mission so that everyone understands it, remembers it, and owns it. When this happens, people sense their work has meaning.
Good mission statements are simple, powerful, and emotive. Here are some examples:
1. Disney: “To entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling.”
2. Amazon: “To be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
3. Nordstrom: “To prove our customers with the best possible service.”
4. Costco: “To continually provide our members with quality goods and services at the lowest possible prices.”
5. Google: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
6. Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”
7. eBay: “To be the world’s favorite destination for discovering great value and unique selection.”
8. Uniqlo: “To create truly great clothing with new and unique value and to enable people all over the world to experience the joy, happiness and satisfaction of wearing such great clothes.”
9. McDonald’s: “To serve safe and delicious food to our customers each and every day.”
10. Starbucks: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”
Cynics—those who celebrate the negative view of business portrayed in the Dilbert comic strips or the television show The Office—may discount mission statements as a collection of meaningless words whose aim is corporate propaganda. In some cases, this may be true. But in most cases, it’s not. When an entrepreneurial leader chooses the right words to express the mission, communicates them effectively, models the right behaviors, and takes steps to align the workforce and culture around this mission, the results can be dramatic.
When not done well, however, mission or vision statements can be demotivating. Imagine you work in one of the following four organizations. You’re given one of the mission statements that follow. Study it for thirty seconds, then try to recite it back. Now imagine using it while recruiting new team members, establishing core values, and setting up great execution. Try to explain how each set of words might differentiate it from any number of competitors:
1. “Provide our customers with the most convenient access to media entertainment, including movie and game entertainment delivered through multiple distribution channels such as our stores, by mail, vending and kiosks, online and at home. We believe [we] offer customers a value-priced entertainment experience, combining the broad product depth of a specialty retailer with local neighborhood convenience.”
2. “To make sure that we are all working in the same direction, each of us must live and breathe [our company’s] values and use them as a guidepost for our actions and decisions.”
3. “Improve the lives of our members and customers by providing quality services, products and solutions that earn their trust and build lifetime relationships.”
4. “Make every associate and customer feel Welcome, Important and Appreciated, which paves the way for a positive work atmosphere at our corporate headquarters and an inviting shopping experience in our stores.”
All are vague. Many are too long. Some are merely descriptive of the status quo, lost in the weeds of the current product offering. Some, in contrast, leave you with no clue what the company offers customers. Few are distinctive, poetic, or memorable.
The company behind each, in order: Blockbuster, Circuit City, Sears, and A&P.
All of these firms have filed for bankruptcy. It would be unfair to trace their failure to a mushy and indistinctive mission or vision statement. Still, when the labored-over phrase that is meant to be the company’s rallying cry is interchangeable with those of any other enterprise, it’s not a good sign.
I’m fortunate to have seen firsthand the power of a great mission at JetBlue. Prior to starting the company, David Neeleman had helped lead another airline that he sold to Southwest. After that deal closed, he’d gone to work for Southwest and its legendary founder, Herb Kelleher. During his five-month stay there, Neeleman studied the company’s economic model, which allowed it to offer flights to passengers at low cost.
During this era, in the mid-1990s, airplanes had begun to feel like crowded, expensive buses in the sky. Whatever glamour surrounded air travel in the 1950s and 1960s had faded in the two decades since deregulation. Neeleman’s goal was to take the Southwest low-fare model and transform it into an enjoyable and inclusive experience, with more focus on passenger comfort and caring service. Some of the specific ways to do that were already on our drawing boards. With wider seats covered in comfortable leather, live television offered free to every passenger, and free snacks, Neeleman had created clear ways to operationalize the JetBlue offering into a distinctive value proposition. The mission he’d chosen—“To bring humanity back to air travel”—perfectly captured his aims. Getting this mission right is one of the reasons JetBlue got off to such a strong launch.
Getting these words right is harder than it looks. Eight years after JetBlue’s founding, its board (of which I was a brand-new chair) decided to update the mission statement. During an off-site meeting, directors spent an hour trying to craft a pithy, meaningful phrase that captured the aim of what was then a $2 billion airline. Our results sounded like our auditors had drafted it. The key line declared that our airline would become “the premier value-based carrier in the Americas.” We used the phrase internally for a time but quickly recognized it was not simple or powerful or emotive—and that not a single customer, crewmember, or shareholder would find meaning in that phrase. So we tried to think harder about what constituted “winning.”
After Neeleman left the company, his successor, David Barger, wanted to expand the mission, and it became even simpler. The new mission became: “Serving humanity.” This made sense not only for simplicity, but because JetBlue’s business was expanding. As we began offering vacation packages, for instance, we weren’t just in the airline business anymore. Now under our third CEO, Robin Hayes, JetBlue is beginning the process of offering transatlantic travel and broader services, so we’ve again begun rewriting the mission statement.
Whenever I encounter a first-rate business, I’m struck by how frequently there’s a simple and compelling mission at the root of what the company is trying to achieve. When Bill Gates founded Microsoft, this high-level mission setting included teams committed to “a computer on every desk and in every home”2—a mission which Microsoft has gone on to achieve. When I talked with Stanford students who were joining the social networking startup Facebook in 2006 and 2007, their service had just a few million users (mostly college students) and was dwarfed by MySpace. Nonetheless, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg frequently talked about the company’s mission (“To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”3) along with an audacious goal that some said bordered on the ridiculous: to have more than one billion people using the site, or about one in every seven humans on the planet. As ridiculous as that number sounded at the time, Zuckerberg over delivered—as I write this, Facebook’s monthly user count stands at 2.38 billion.
Many leaders struggle with the difference between mission, vision, values, purpose, principles, goals, objectives, motto, philosophy, and tagline. They all sound like high-level expressions of what a team or organization stands for—a bit too high-minded for some, a bit irrelevant to the real work of the enterprise for others.
When I advise entrepreneurial leaders on how to approach the task of addressing the need for meaning in a pithy, memorable phrase, I suggest they focus on three related but similar notions: mission, values, and tagline.
Mission is the overarching objective the organization is trying to achieve. When I think about mission, I sometimes think of the phrase the officiant utters near the beginning of a traditional wedding service: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today . . .” The company’s mission answers this implied question: What have we gathered here to accomplish?
Values, on the other hand, are where you spend your money, your time, and your mind share. Consider Apple. While its mission statement (which I won’t take the space to quote here) is too long, too focused on individual products, and not very inspiring, its values, as articulated by current CEO Tim Cook, are a strong example of how a firm can express its core values in a compelling way:
1. We are constantly focusing on innovating.
2. We believe in the simple not the complex.
3. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
4. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.
5. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
6. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.
One helpful way to think about developing your team’s mission, values, and tagline is to try to find phrases that succinctly and uniquely describe three things:
1. What we do.
2. How we do it.
3. Who we are.
An entrepreneurial leader who can create a single, memorable phrase that highlights the essence of his or her organization and what makes it different from all others has found pixie dust—something employees will recite, investors will back, and customers will turn into a habit.
When an organization has an effective mission, odds are most employees could recite a reasonably close version of it. Mission statements give focus—usually around a word or two, a unique deliverable at the heart of the mission. Not all are short; but they all connect to what people experience with the brand and represent a uniqueness that most people inside and outside the enterprise would recognize as setting it apart from its competitors.
In an era when so many business leaders think and speak about the necessity of “doing well by doing good,” it’s worth taking a moment to address the advisability of adding social responsibility to a mission. Those who claim virtue as a part of their mission—to say explicitly they are making the world a better place—risk confusion. It’s fine to list virtues in a separate statement, but the mission—the objective, the highest purpose of the enterprise—is not a forum in which to demonstrate integrity to the world. Claiming virtue as a mission risks cynicism.
Mission statements should be short, unambiguous, and meaningful. Good ones leave no one guessing about what business the company is in. (For instance, the mission statement of General Motors surely would be better if it included something to do with vehicles.) When contrasting the mission statements of successful with unsuccessful companies, I think of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s words: “The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it.”4 Those who have not wrestled complexity to the ground to expose the essence of their firm, their institution, or their family have fallen short. The best ones show a one-of-a-kind mission or a striving to be the best at what others are also striving to do.
Finally, taglines are different but derivative. The tagline is meant for external consumption. It’s how your customer reads your mission. It’s a catchphrase or slogan that’s used in the company’s advertising and branding.
Aimed at an external audience, taglines are often produced in consultation with an ad agency. Very often, they aren’t in place until well after a company launches its original product—and very often, they change every few years.
Taglines share an important similarity with mission and values: when a company finds the right one, it can be an important element in helping it discover, hone, and communicate its essence and describe its uniqueness. As with missions, taglines are most effective if they’re short and memorable. Done well, taglines can be another tool to help employees and customers find meaning in what the company is trying to accomplish.
Here are some of my favorite taglines:
1. Jimmy John’s: “Freaky Fast Freaky Fresh.”
2. Whole Foods: “Whole Foods—Whole People—Whole Planet.”
3. Allstate: “You’re in good hands with Allstate.”
4. Spotify: “Music for everyone.”
5. L.L.Bean: “The outside is inside everything we make.”
6. Nike: “Just do it.”
7. United States Marine Corps: “The Few. The Proud.”
One needn’t have a formal mission statement to have a mission. My father found meaning in his work as a research scientist. He studied agriculture and biology, working to breed new strains of onions, carrots, and cucumbers. Many of the projects he pursued aimed to create vegetables with higher levels of vitamins—for example, a new kind of carrot with more beta-carotene to help malnourished children in developing countries overcome the scourge of nutritional blindness.
To my father, this work was meaningful. It became his personal mission, his own version of trying to put a man on the moon. He believed he had the best job in the world, and if given a chance to trade places and careers with Warren Buffett, he would have said no.
That’s the power of finding meaning in one’s work and making it your personal mission.
RECAP
• Work hard to articulate a clear purpose, a desired end result, what winning looks like.
• Differentiate between (1) your values—where you spend your time, money, and mind share, (2) your mission—what describes your unique purpose, and (3) your tagline—what your customers will see as your “promise” to them.
• Extend this notion of mission to everything you do.