Your mission statement finds you

When was the last time you saw somebody take the company mission statement down off the wall and say, “According to THIS, we ought to be doing THAT”?

Never, I’ll bet.  Most likely nobody has ever heard of the company mission statement.  If they knew about it and could even find it, it would have so much dust on it that it would be unreadable.

Have you ever had to endure the creation of a mission statement?  If you don’t have PTSD, the answer is no.  It usually starts when some new boss says, “What, we don’t have a mission statement?!  We need to write a mission statement!” like ‘How did you morons survive before I got here?’

The next six weeks are going to be hell.  Once a week everyone will crowd into a conference room for an interminable food fight.  Everybody has their pet phrase that has to get crammed in somehow.  Adjectives, adverbs, leverages, synergies, and agiles will be thrown at the wall until they form a tangled cross-word puzzle, understandable to nobody.

Each week we will dread the day of the mission statement meeting.  Everyone will come in ready to die on their steaming pile of words.  By the end of that day all life will be boiled out of our hearts and we’ll just want to slink home. 

The next week, it will go on again.  Then one day, the new boss declares it done.  The final text is converted into expensive plaques that get nailed up on conference room walls…and they will disappear from our concious minds, never to be seen again.

Compare that to the greatest mission statement of all time.  What was it?  Please take a moment to think before continuing.

There’s no question what the answer is:  “Failure is not an option.”

The interesting part is that it was never written down.  Later, Gene Kranz was asked,

"Weren't there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?" My answer was "No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them."

Whatever NASA’s official mission statement was, “Failure is not an option” was the real one.  It didn’t have to be written down.  It was embedded at a molecular level in everybody.  It was only articulated when a crisis extruded it.

And how did it get embedded at a molecular level?  That happened because everyone lived it on a daily basis during the design, build, and test phases of the Apollo project.

You do not discover your mission statement.  You most certainly don’t create one.  Your mission statement finds you.  It come from the culture you have created, not the other way around.

How about you?  Do you have a similar story?  Comment below.