Mission Statements

The two things that all successful organizations have in common: having a tangible mission statement and empowering everybody to do their part to make sure that the mission statement actually manifests into reality.

Zappos mission is to provide the best customer service possible. It works because their is no customer service department; everybody, at every level of the organization, is empowered to provided that customer with the best service.

Similarly, Starbucks has a very tangible, albeit slightly longer, statement consisting of sourcing the finest coffee, the promise of a perfect beverage, highest quality customer-employee interactions and welcoming stores that "are a break from the outside". I bet you could have paraphrased their mission statement just by your experiences in the store. 

"Put a computer on every desk and in every home." That was Microsoft's old mission statement, and the evolution of computers clearly reflect it. In computer's infancy, they were expensive and impossible for all but experts to use. Microsoft solved these issues by driving the commoditization of hardware to bring down prices and continually making the operating systems easier to use.

Now that a computer is essentially on every desk, and has been for a few years, Microsoft has had to create a new mission statement. This one consists of many fancy sounding phrases like "Interoperability among assistive technology products". 

What does that even mean?

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Microsoft's decaying public perception is a direct result of their hand-wavy mission statement, but I would imagine it definitely plays a part.

If having tangible mission statements work for companies, imagine what a personal mission statement could do for all of us...