Intro for final paper

Executive Summary- 

Every day we seem to be bombarded by tasks and appointments. Our daily planners are always packed full with reminders. More times than not, we do not have enough hours in a day to finish all that we have set out for ourselves. Some say that if we set long-term and short-term goals that it will help us stay focused. The key to setting goals is making sure that they are attainable, concise, and subject to failure. If not, then there is no way to gauge their progress or success. Much of this is the same in the business world. It is very easy to see how a large corporation could get off track if central goals and objectives were not established in the beginning. There is a definite need for a company to decide who they are and what they are all about. Because of this need the mission statement was born.

  

The key points of writing a successful mission statement are priceless when it comes to building and sustaining a profitable business. Without them a company can become lost. Many companies have ignored this advice. A new way of thinking and writing will have to be put in place in order for business to be able to profit from their mission statements.  To quote the infamous Machiavelli, “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, that to institute a new order of things.” But that is exactly what needs to happen—a new order of things. The public has allowed businesses to publish statements of absurdity for way to long. Something has to change. 

Intro and history-

In the world we live in today it is hard to remember when companies did not have mission statements. It seems like they have been around as long as the cotton gin, but this is far from the case. Deborah Cameron, an English businesswoman, went on hiatus in the late 1980s. When she returned to England in 1990 she found out that the rules of business had changed. “I no longer spoke the language. My difficulty was not with ordinary conversation, but with public discourse” (Cameron). Cameron was confused when company-wide “aims and objectives” were discussed in business meetings and when her supervisors set out quality objectives. She did not understand what all of this meant. She was unaware that a corporate takeover of public language had taken place. While Cameron had been away, companies had brainwashed their employees with corporate missions and department-wide objectives. The main thing that shocked her were these statements being produced that were supposed to sum up an entire business in one to two sentences. Cameron had discovered the corporate mission statement. She had always viewed the mission statements as “long and convoluted statements of the obvious” (Cameron). For the most part, she was right. She did not see the need for companies to write out meaningless mottos and use glitzy words to conceal the truth. There was no validity to these statements. After all, as she points out, “who the hell would pursue second rateness?” (Cameron). No company would publicly admit that their mission is to be average or second best. Mission statements are meant to be perceived as a guideline for company policy, but they do not allude to the real goals of capitalist enterprises. We never see mission statements stating that their purpose is to mark up prices so that they can get a 40-50% return on profits or lay off 25% of their workforce to meet a certain quota. This type of statement would run any company into the ground. But yet these are the real goals and objectives given to executives and managers company wide.

The purpose of mission statements is to give the customer and employees a perceived impression of where the business is going and, ideally, what guidelines and principles managers are supposed to follow. The key word in the previous statement is “perceived.” “The mission statement belongs to an era in which the main purpose of many companies [was] not making but branding things; the language in which a company represents itself to the world is part of its brand-image” (Cameron). For example, no one needs to be told what universities and hospitals do. What they would like to be told about is their dedication to customer satisfaction and what their ethical standards are. Many companies have little more than a “consistent experience of the brand” in their mission statements (Cameron). Many companies in the corporate world are “fluent in promotional jargon, accentuating the positive even if that means being economical with truth” (Cameron). They will say any and everything to make their company sound like the optimal picture of success. Cameron points out that “there is growing faith in the power of managed language to transform less tractable realities. The premise of corporate customer care is: say the right words, speak nicely, and all will be forgiven” (Cameron). If this is true then mission statements ultimately serve no purpose. This, however, cannot be entirely true or they would have never become such a staple of the corporate environment. The fact still remains that most corporate mission statements are worthless (Askoff). ““They often formulate necessities as objectives, for example, “To achieve sufficient profit”” (Askoff) There are some statements out there that inspire and motivate stakeholders to make the company bigger, better, and more successful. I hope by doing this analysis that I am able to uncover what it really takes for companies to produce statements that will have this effect. For a mission statement to be effective, companies have to know and understand what makes them worthless. I would also like to use my analysis to bring to light some of the ridiculous attempts by companies to publicly publish statements of absurdity and nonsense. I will also point out a few statements that I personally enjoy and that instantly inspired me. Hopefully, all of this will help the reader and myself to understand more about what kind of missions statements are worth writing and what kind our worth keeping to ourselves.  

For the purpose of explanation, I have decided to change around the three main topics from the way they appear in the title. I think this is necessary to give adequate information to the reader so that they may get a better understanding of my analysis.