Most people today not remember a time when companies did not use mission statements. When we think of mission statements we think of broad ideologies that make the company seem like sound and morally correct machines. Deborah Cameron, author of Tyranny of Nice Speak, does. After two years abroad she returned to Britain to find that everything had changed. She was confused by the obscurity of the concept of “quality” discussed at almost every business meeting she attended. She was also taken back when a fast food worker told her to enjoy her meal after only ordering milk. Why were people saying these things?
She quickly began to understand this new phenomenon. It was a revolution in public language fueled by the business world. No longer were people seeing objectives off as fads or ridiculous demands by upper level management. People were adopting them as the norm. The language had “pervade[ed] both the public and private sectors, and much of the working population [was] fluent in it.”
The mission statements of our era are not specific at all. They are optimistic clichés that give broad, emotionally, and “fluffy” statements of how the company wants others to view it. They are merely a brand. We are in an “era in which the main purpose of many companies is not making but branding-things; the language in which a company represents itself to the world is part of its brand image.” Therefore, it is not what the actual mission statement serves to accomplish, but what image or view of the company it portrays. As Cameron also points out, mission statements are only “for purposes of self-promotion rather than public information.”
This did not happen naturally. It was a cause of “corporation’s growing desire to regulate and control the language that its representatives used.” They want to design one centrally contingent voice for the company. This causes these statements to not state the true objectives of the company, but be “a long and convoluted statement of the obvious.” Cameron points out that no one would shoot for the bottom of the barrel saying: “Who the hell would pursue second-rateness?”
