What’s Our Mission Again?
Starbucks-Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.
Microsoft-At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.
Google-Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Olan Mills-To provide customer satisfaction which will continue the successful growth and development of Olan Mills as the world’s premier portrait company offering quality portraits at reasonable prices through dedicated, challenged and involved people.
Lifetouch-To capture images that celebrate life, provide comfort and remind us of what we hold most dear.
Seth Godin’s Generic Mission Statement-To satisfy our customers’ desires for personal entertainment and information through total customer satisfaction.
All of the Assembly Line Portrait Companies I have worked for over the years have Mission Statements-most of them closely resemble Seth and Olan’s mixture of business speak and meaningless cliches. I actually like Lifetouch’s short and snappy Mission Statement-though my experience at Lifetouch in the super fast Assembly Line of the School Portraits the Mission was more like Shoot as fast as you can and get out.
If they were being honest, all companies would have the exact same mission statement-Make as Much Money as Possible by Any Means Necessary. But that lacks a certain amount of feel good warmth and fuzziness.
Many of the Assembly Line Portrait companies I have worked for over the years have gone out of business, taking their lofty Mission Statements with them. I know they all had Mission Statements as it was a cornerstone of every meeting-like saying the Pledge of Allegiance when you were in 6th grade. The one thing none of them ever mentioned was making money or selling portraits. At least the Olan Mills Mission Statement says they offer quality portraits at reasonable prices. I might debate the quality and reasonable parts, and they did wimp out by saying offer instead of sell.
I remember listening to a radio show about Cars one time. Someone called in and said they only looked at cars when the car lots where closed-so they wouldn’t be harassed by salespeople while they kicked the tires. The host of the show asked since when is trying to sell something harassment? Our business is selling portraits is not going to appear in many Mission Statements-as Mission Statements aren’t about business, they’re about an Ideal.
The people running the Company love to talk about Customer Service-of course, they never go anywhere near a customer. As a Front Line Employee I meet the customers and interact with them. My job is to take a set of portraits and hand them off to the Passer, who will do everything in their power to make the Sale. Close The Sale is not going to show up in many Mission Statements either, but closing the sale is the bottom line. Without Sales, there is no company-period.
So there is often a fundamental conflict between The Company and the people who work for it. I’ve worked at Companies where they spread the lie that Customer Satisfaction in The Most Important Job-at the same time, they threaten to fire any Employee that doesn’t have a certain Sales Average. We are selling a product no one needs and we are being told that we have to make our Sales Quotas, but we can’t use any traditional sales techniques to make our Averages.
A close relative of the Mission Statement is the cliche We Will Exceed Our Customer’s Expectations! Our customers walk in the door expecting to take One Free Portrait and leave-as soon as we take more than one portrait we have blown their expectations out of the water-in the wrong direction. My God Martha! They’re going to try and Sell Us Something! And yet, we are still told at meetings to go the extra mile and that it’s all up to us to make our customers happy.
And amazingly, most of our Customers are happy. It’s the Nonbuyers that bitch and moan most of the time. They are the ones most likely to call and Complain, the ones most likely to find a copy of the Mission Statement and point out how we failed their expectations, and the ones most likely to return again-so they can complain some more.
Mission Statements are meaningless and tend to be ignored by anyone who actually works at a company-unlike the Managers, VPs, and CEOs who just have their snouts in the trough. I’ll close this will my all time favorite Mission Statement-
The mission statement of Nutzmedia.com reads as follows:
Our Mission Statement
- Rule The World
- Get lots of cookies
- Eat the cookies
- Get more cookies
- Eat those cookies too.