Strategy 101 - Mission

The vision statement tells why the organization exists and has a multi-decade time horizon. The mission statement lays out the way the company will move toward the vision, with a three to five year horizon.

The mission statement communicates three essential ideas:

• What the organization does
• Who it does it for
• How it does it differently from others

This can usually be done in no more than three sentences.

Here is an example. This is Google’s mission statement as of 2007, quoted from their web site: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It says what they do, though at a pretty abstract level. It only implies both who they do it for and how they do it that is special. It is misnamed. This is a vision statement.

Here is our version of a Google mission statement: "We provide the fastest, most useful, and easiest-to-use web search results for anyone with Internet access. We monetize web search through advertising targeted to search results. We provide Internet users with free or low cost web based services that leverage our computing infrastructure and provide us with opportunities to extend the reach of search and targeted advertising."

Like the vision statement, the mission statement is declarative. It starts with "we" or "our" so that it is clear that it belongs to the organization and that everyone in the organization is part of the effort to achieve the mission. It uses no extra words to describe the "what, who and how."

The mission statement tells the organization what it needs to focus on in the near-term in order to make the vision happen.

(The examples used above are made up by the author unless explicitly attributed. Any similarity of these fictional examples to those used by actual organizations is coincidental and unintentional.)

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

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