Enterprise Methods: What Business Are You In?

Many of the businesses I have visited have produced what they call a “Mission Statement”. These are typically pledges of goodness that come to be displayed prominently on a wall plagues and Web pages. Most are assertions of commitment to customers, quality, and and service, and all are inevitably festooned with meaningless superlatives like “best”, “world class”, “highest”, and “most”.

When I ask managers, workers, and even customers, about the meaning, believability, and usefulness of these pretty words, most reply, with a wink and a nod, that they are basically window dressing and have little with the business of business. Basically on par with Hallmark greeting card sentimentality, the reality of the workaday world soon makes it clear to all, that their sentiments as no more than “wouldn’t be nice if…?”

As is so often the case, the failure to understand theory renders the most powerful of tools, into useless decoration. Worse yet, the job that needs to be done remains undone.

The purpose of a mission statement, or whatever you want to call it, is to define the boundary conditions of your system of enterprise. It must stated in a manner that says what your business does, and at least by implication, what it does not do. This document is not designed for public consumption. It is priviledged and proprietary information and has no place on a plaque in the reception area. It is produced in order to communicate the scope of the enterprise to all participants.

Why is it important to clearly set forth the boundary conditions of the enterprise?

1. A system is a symbolic construct. It is not your people, materials, equipment, customers, and facilities, it is your theory of how your methods shape the interactions between people, materials, equipment, customers, and facilities into a working whole that creates valuable product and service. Your mission statement gives substance to your theory of enterprise. Without a statement that sets forth the boundaries of your system, how could anyone know?

2. Everyday, the participants in your enterprise are confronted with situations in which myriad decisions must be made. Your mission statement provides them with the knowledge needed to make those decisions in a manner that supports the mission and avoids decisions that squander precious resources in unrelated activity.

3. In military parlance, the failure to clearly define mission causes “mission creep”. The problems created by creep have plagued military operations throughout history. It is not that a mission never changes, but then when change is required, the mission statement assures that everyone knows and that the system is modified in accordance with the changed mission. Your mission statement keeps your theory of value creation front and center. It allows everyone in the organization to test the enterprise’s theory of value creation in action. As the world changes and as knowledge is created, the mission of an enterprise will evolve and the boundary conditions set forth in the mission statement will also need to be changed. The statement is a working document — always in-process.

Dr. W. E. Deming used the example of a buggy whip manufacturing company to place the issue of mission front and center. He told the story of a company that produced buggy whips of the highest quality at the turn of the 19th Century. They had honed their processes to a fine edge. The problem of course, was that with the advent of the automobile, their buggy whip mission was about to become irrelevant. If only they had had the precense of mind to draw their system boundaries a bit differently. For example, had they defined their mission in terms of acceleration devices, carburetors might have become only a short leap forward from buggy whips.

As the buggy whip example demonstrates, the task of sculpting a mission statement is challenging. It must focus activity in a manner that supports the enterprise efficiently while embracing future possibilities that are often unknowable. When you begin work, you will discover that people differ in their understanding of the enterprise’s mission. If you understand the nature of the job, the process of creating substantive statements of boundary conditions will not be an easy one, but nobody said business was supposed to be easy.

In summary, a carefully constructed mission statement is a dynamic document that lends substance to your theory of enterprise and serves to guide action in both the present and the future. So leave the Hallmark greeting card sentiments posted in the reception area and get to work on a mission statement that can actually guide your enterprising actions.