Mission and Vision

Here are some examples of mission and vision statements. Not only do they seem archaic, but they are wrapped in so much corporate-speak that few can make sense of their intention.

What Are We Building?

In recent discussions with Rita McGrath, a leading expert on strategy, she put it this way. The strategies and processes that were originally put in place to provide “maximum value from a competitive advantage, become a liability when the environment requires the capacity to surf through waves of short-lived opportunities.”

In other words, instead of building a ship to sail with the changing tides, companies often build massive management machinery that can't move, gets swamped by change, and rusts.

Kodak believed that photos would always be film based. AT&T believed that people would always use landlines. Leading tech companies believed that tablets and PCs would always be the norm. In fact, tablet sales are down 22 percent this year, and the trend is expected to continue.

These companies were structured with lofty sounding missions and visions, and what seemed like disciplined strategy development and execution. But it was these very systems, processes, and beliefs that put them in jeopardy.

In the twentieth century these processes and operating disciplines were often heralded as game-changing. But when the strategies and tactics were not monitored and adjusted for changing conditions, leaders mistook the crash of the iceberg against the hull for applause.

Leaders created cultures of complacency and bureaucracy where the processes became more important than the outcomes and marketplace impact. After all, they thought, we have decades to get things right.

When Linda was working at General Electric (GE), it invested in RIM. It was a cutting-edge company and moving fast. Of course, RIM provided all the GE executives with BlackBerrys and everyone got hooked.

RIM regularly made great improvements in the BlackBerry and life was good. People couldn't live without their BlackBerrys. The company was making record profits, and GE made its investment back in spades.

But then came the smartphones, touchscreens, and all the bells and whistles. Sadly, RIM could not keep up. Its culture had become complacent with its success. The competition, which never got the memo about innovation taking years to move through the hierarchy, was simply too fast for a methodic organization like RIM.

Contrast this with Amazon, which started out as an online retailer, simply selling printed books. That was it. And then it morphed and stretched into a massive online juggernaut. Who ever thought that Amazon would be the biggest retailer and the largest cloud storage company in the world?

Not Walmart. Or Kmart. Or Borders.

Now Amazon produces movies and curates news. Here is its mission statement:

“To be the Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Why is Amazon so successful? How has it navigated so much technological change and market turmoil?

One main difference is that it has a compelling purpose that drives all other strategies, tactics, and activities: Deliver what the customers want to buy, when and where they want it. You can count on Amazon to deliver whatever you order—whether it's a phone, a book, a can of organic chicken soup, or a cute dress that you need this weekend—in its trademark box to your doorstep. Taking that to the next level, Amazon recently announced a partnership with Goodwill where customers could repack their Amazon delivery box with items for donation and then have these shipped for free to Goodwill. Innovation that links directly to purpose, reinforces culture, and informs leadership behavior.

In another scenario, Amazon could have continued to serve only customers who wanted printed books. It could have done that well and never even changed the game with e-books. But it chose a greater purpose.

Markets change.

Technology disrupts.

Culture evolves.

People learn.

Relationships grow.

Purpose remains.

Old-fashioned planning and mission statements do nothing to propel a company forward in today's markets. Dump them and replace them with a simple purpose statement.

A clear purpose statement unleashes the intellect of employees to meet the needs of team members and customers.

Purpose

Greg Ellis, former CEO and managing director of REA Group, said his company's purpose was “to make the process simple, efficient, and stress-free for people buying and selling property.”

This takes outward focus to a whole new level, not just emphasizing the importance of serving customers or understanding their needs but also putting managers and employees in the customers' shoes. It's outward-focused: This is what we're doing for someone else. And the purpose is motivational because it connects with the heart as well as the head. Indeed, Ellis called it the company's “philosophical heartbeat.”²

This embodies the difference a compelling purpose can make. It is an outside-in view of what the company does.

Purpose begins with the promise to customers—not giving the customers everything they want but rather living up to the promise they make to customers.

As Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, a partner at The RBL Group, and a thought leader in human resources put it in our recent conversation, what makes the difference today is being clear on your promise to the customer. Having a customer-centric view ensures you are delivering on what you say you will deliver.

The best purpose statements are timeless and adjust with changing technology and changing circumstances. They are inspiring, as in “providing clean water for all the people in the world.” Not only is this stirring, but it guides behavior. Is what I am doing going to help create clean water for people, and if not, why am I doing it? It helps create clear direction.

But an effective purpose also has another very important role: to create an authentic emotional hook for the betterment of society.

Purpose Is Inspiring

We know from studying the brain that emotion creates a strong motivational factor for people, which, in turn, promotes action. Purpose aligns people's behaviors around something that makes a difference to others.

Contrast this with this statement from famed former CEO, Jack Welsh, of GE. Jack's mantra was the much-touted “be number one or two in the market.”

Jack used this phrase consistently to guide GE's impressive market growth. No question this mantra was followed by many in the 1990s. And think about this statement from the CEO of a very large tech company. His organizing vision for his company was to achieve billions of dollars in revenues by 2020. While this vision was compelling on one level, it certainly was not inspiring and definitely did not create an emotional hook. This vision was completely market-driven, not customer-driven, and did not impel employees to support the greater good.

The GE mantra engaged the head—the logic of the statement is unquestionable. But purpose engages the head and the heart and aligns emotion with the logic, a powerful combination for inspiring a rallying cry.

A command and control leadership style, coupled with a focus on greed, causes questionable practices that actually hurt people.

Add a mission statement that is solely market-driven, and you have the perfect storm for corruption.

If your guiding directive is to make money, you and your team may do that at all costs because that, presumably, is what will be rewarded. The lofty mission and vision statements will continue to be ignored because they are already being ignored.

The CEO of a very large tech company, who we were working with, insisted that the raison d'etre of his company was the $3 billion number. In every meeting he harped on the fact that this was the goal. How uninspiring, financially driven, and completely disconnected from the customer.

Who gets excited about a number? Robots and artificial intelligence aficionados we suppose, but that's another chapter.

The reason GE continued to thrive was, and is, the strong values the company embraced deeply in its culture.

The Power of Purpose

Today there are more than 2 billion people under 20 years of age in the world. These are people who will be in our workforce shortly, and many are already here. In fact, over 45 percent of the workforce is millennials. Why is this important?

These 2 billion people have a different drummer that motivates them. We have raised children to give back and to be less compelled by making vast amounts of money at others' expense.

We were raised by people who survived the Great Depression and two catastrophic world wars, which shaped a greater perceived need for personal security. That motivation has changed.

Linda recently had the pleasure of meeting Jared Kleinert, an impressive millennial who coauthored the book 2 Billion Under 20 with Stacey Ferreira.

When she first saw the title of the book, Linda mistakenly thought that he made 2 billion dollars before he was 20 years old. We'll talk about unconscious bias and preconceptions later in this book.

Jared is on a mission to counter the view that millennials are mostly selfish, whiny young people who have to be coddled.

He asked millennials to share stories of what they were working on, and the stories are amazing. Linda's first reaction was great admiration for these young people and for what they are doing. Some of their efforts failed the first time, but they kept trying and did amazing things. But here is the defining feature of what all these young people did.

They were motivated by a compelling purpose for the greater good.

These folks were working on ideas that would solve worldwide problems. In particular, Jared pointed out that millennials were not interested in making widgets better or improving process. They were interested in solving “big, hairy problems” that plague mankind.

All the many actions these young people take on are geared to a noble purpose and will make the world a better place. Aspirational, perhaps, but nonetheless awe-inspiring.

If companies are to attract these young people, they must also have an awe-inspiring purpose.

Purpose and People

Mike Derezin, VP of sales solutions for LinkedIn, recently shared his thoughts about purpose:

We really try to explain that we are here for this purpose. We're a mission-driven company and for us to achieve our mission and our vision we obviously need revenue and profits, but those are actually secondary. We're here for far more than just to make money.

Purpose is meaning, and we all want meaning, so I think it obviously hits the very core of who we all are as humans. But one of the reasons that's increasingly important is if you look at a lot of studies and conversations with millennials they over-index on purpose far more than other generations.

For example, you could take an industry like insurance. Is the real way to rally your team around revenue goals for the year? Or to start with a very personal story of what the insurance company did to help some of their policy holders? Lead with that and then go into, “now, how do you get there?”

In the twentieth century, people came into work, but their emotional purpose was outside the workplace—usually back at home.

In the twenty-first century it's the emotional purpose that causes people to come to work.

Banking on Purpose

Here is an example of how a staid bank turned itself into a powerful force for its customers by methodically articulating a powerful purpose statement and values.

Right from the start, the company strove to identify its values. “I wanted to make sure we thought about what we stood for as a company,” said Margaret M. Keane, President and CEO of Synchrony Financial. “And more importantly, how do we take what we saw as the good things of GE, bring those forward, and then create our own vision and purpose for our company? So I embarked on this very early in the IPO process. I felt it was very important that the organization rallied around and felt good about our purpose and our values.”

Crafting their purpose statement was a team effort, involving input from customers, the leadership team, and employees throughout the entire company. The process was labor-intensive, but Margaret said, “It was something I felt strongly about—that in order for us to come out of the gate as a strong, highly valued company, having a purpose and values that we believed in was really important to us as an organization.”

Their statement still guides company activities every day, Margaret told Linda. “We've been rolling this out across the whole company and in various unique and fun ways.”

For example, an intra-company profile website encourages employees to post images of how they're living their favorite values. “I think it's really working to show how those values are coming alive inside the company.”

Linda was impressed when she walked into Synchrony Financial's office and saw statements from employees and customers on video. The testimonials showcased how Synchrony helped them with a particular life crisis. Nowhere did she see platitudes from the leaders, and especially not Margaret, telling us how great the company is.

Instead, the company's purpose statement was on full display, in words and actions: “Our purpose is to pioneer the future of financing, improving the success of every business we serve and the quality of each life we touch.”

Contrast this with the many CEOs that we see in airplanes talking about how great their company is and how big it is now that it has merged. Nothing exudes from these pronouncements except that big equals money.

This is particularly frustrating when we miss a connection that the airlines could have avoided or experience horrible customer service from people who couldn't care less that we could not get home after a long workweek.

We met Lisa McLeod, author of Leading with Noble Purpose, at a recent authors' summit where she was interviewing our friend, Marshall Goldsmith.

Lisa had always been in sales and worked with salespeople all over the world. She shared this story about a saleswoman she had worked with.

“The sales person got to know a patient that had a very rare and tough form of an illness. She had been introduced to the patient by the physician who was treating her. This salesperson jumped through hoops to get a medication to this woman who would have suffered if she did not have it. The salesperson saw it not as a sales role to sell the drug but as her purpose to ensure this woman had what she needed. She saw in her role a greater purpose—helping to save this woman's life.”

This changed everything for her. This made her job intensely meaningful. It changed the whole dynamic of what she did every day from making money to helping people in need. This is the essence of purpose-driven organizations—and purpose-driven people.

Purpose is powerful. It appeals to our inner need as humans to contribute to the greater good.

What is your real purpose on earth?

Ours is to build great leaders and organizations so everyone can thrive.

It can be hard to live your purpose 100 percent of the time, we are human after all, but good leaders strive to do so. And great leaders regularly reflect on how well they are aligned with, and living, their purpose and make changes accordingly.

Purpose is a leadership journey, not a destination.

On the organizational level, do you really believe the values you put forward?

What is the greater good you and your company provide to the customer?

What would customers say is really your brand—not the brand your marketing people are trying to make others to believe.

Future-Proof Your Company

• Does your company have a relevant purpose? Or are you coasting on motivations left over from the previous century? Dare to take down those tired placards and replace them with a simple, compelling purpose.
• How do current initiatives stack up beside your purpose? Where are the connects and disconnects?
• Is your purpose future-focused and adaptable?
• Do you hold everyone, especially your leaders, accountable for walking the talk and living that purpose? Or do you tolerate toxic behaviors and bad apples because of the results they deliver despite the cost?

Future-Proof Your Career

• Have you really examined why you work? Yes, we know it is to support your family and strive for a better life. But how do you define your better life? Is it values-based or money-based?
• On a personal level, dig deep for your compelling values. What is the legacy you want to leave, and what is it you want to be remembered for? This may sound trite, but it is an important reflection point. As our good friend Marshall Goldsmith often asks, “When you're 90 years old on your deathbed, what do you want to be remembered for? Is it that $30 million of cost you took out or the people you helped achieve their dreams?”
• Have a five-minute call with a colleague every week. Share your values and purpose with each other and ask, “Have I behaved consistently with my values and purpose?” If not, what can you do next week to drive more consistency?