“(When it comes to mission statements)… you’re fighting for people’s attention. When people begin reading a mission statement, they have low expectations. They’re expecting a piece of corporate cliché apparently provided purely because the company knows it ought to have one.”
- Bernard Marr, LinkedIn poster and strategic advisor
Recently, at a Client’s site, we were working on messaging. We were NOT working on a mission statement or a vision statement. We were working on a go-to-market message for a new initiative, one that should be difference-making for the Client. It will, when successful, be difference-making for the constituents touched by the initiative, and (oh, yeah!) it has the potential to be difference-making for an audience about eleventy-three times bigger (remember, “bigger” and “more better” are technical terms here at The Diff!).
Not ironically, this long-standing, well-intentioned, and very successful Client’s leadership team couldn’t recite its mission or vision statements, and the exceptionally bright team of professionals around the table started out sort of hating the exercise, at least a little.
Until they didn’t.
Until it landed.
Eight words. Compelling, direct, non-confrontational, non-controversial. Instead, it’s differentiating, meaningful and formed in a way that even opposing organizations would have to say, “Dang it, how do you argue with THAT?” And, in getting there, a few of the team used the magic phrase, “Isn’t that how we make a difference?”
In other words, they chose a means of saying what they actually do, instead of trying to create a grandiose statement that they feel like they ought to have.
Ultimately, everything is about execution, of course. It’s a good thing that execution is more straightforward when there’s an eight-word description of what we’re trying to execute and when everyone engaged agrees with it.
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