How To Write Great Mission Statements

Apr 30

How do you produce magic in your mission and make it uniquely ownable? It’s highly subjective, but not unknowable.

To build businesses, brands and products that resonate with humans, leaders need to inspire with a mission, vision and value proposition that stand up a culture — for customers, employees, partners, owners and anybody else in your business orbit. You can’t foster innovation without a mission statement that invites it. Nobody ever created a legacy business with their mission pegged to an MVP.

And yet, the blue-sky conversations often get shunted to a later date — once we schedule that long-overdue offsite. This usually happens because leaders believe mission statements are a marketing product, and, well, we can bring on a proper marketing group with the Series B.

This is wrong. While mission statements and value propositions are indeed the product of a copy writer, usually a marketing hire, they are better viewed as a foundational corporate product, alongside your operating, subscription, partnership, employee and other key agreements. A mission statement represents the bedrock shared values your culture is founded on, and serves as a recruitment filter for your talent. You can’t wait to create a great one until you’ve found product/market fit.

We have worked with, founded and studied scores of startups — the great ones invariably have mission statements that inspire resonant products. So, here are 5 simple strategies for writing mission statements that resonate:

1.) Decouple your product and customer from your mission statement.

Your value proposition will need to encompass all of these elements — Brand Purpose (why you do what you do), Customer Promise (how you do it), Product Requirements (what you need to produce), and Customer (who it is for). Great mission statements keep the product vision at a high level so the mission can encompass a variety of customers and products. For the mission, focus on your why and how.

Here’s why that leads to more powerful mission statements:

One client, Out Leadership, an LGBT+ business network, originated the concept of generating a Return on Equality — clearly, a high human value and a powerful purpose. Where they were having trouble was articulating the business values that fulfilled it. And it was slowing their next phase of growth.

It is a common stumbling point, as most organizations go directly into the product statement after establishing their why — Out Leadership generates Return on Equality with network events, talent cohorts and strategic insights. Those are products and services, however, not business values fulfilling human values — which is a far more useful construct for a mission statement.

To wit:

2.) Think of your mission as a value exchange.

Great mission statements are, in fact, an exchange of values: To [meet a human value], we deliver [business values]. The first half of that construct is your brand purpose; the second half your customer promise. This is where why meets how.

Out Leadership already had a great brand purpose — To create a Return on Equality. Once we got them to think about their how as a set of business values rather than products, we were able to articulate a stronger customer promise: We help Out Leaders and companies connect with talent, transform organizations, and compete on social purpose.

Here’s the essential value exchange:

To create a Return on Equality {human value}, we make it easy to connect talent, transform organizations, and compete on social purpose {business values}.

Four values — a high human one + three business ideals — Equality, Connection, Transformation and Purpose. We will go on to connect this mission to the product and customer (read How To Write Great Value Propositions). However, as a value exchange, Out Leadership now has a mission that can power a variety of businesses — network events, talent meetups, strategic insights, training videos, a knowledge base, and much more.

3.) Become a student of great mission statements.

Then turn them into value exchange constructs — To [meet a human value], we deliver [business values]. As you read a mission statement, take a look at the words that inspire you; those are the values. Once you become adept at identifying them, and how business values intersect with human values, you can create an inspiring mission statement.

To [meet a human value], we deliver [business values].

Learn the construct. Here are some great missions, written as a value exchange construct:

USA: To ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we provide government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Google: To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we provide the easy discovery of a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources.
SpaceX: To make humanity interplanetary, we provide new capabilities to carry humans to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.
NY Times: To seek the truth and help people understand the world, we deliver service to readers and society, continued strength in our journalism and business, and a healthy and vibrant Times culture.

The value exchange construct may never find its way on to your business’ About page, but understanding your mission as precisely that — an exchange of values — will dramatically increase your chances of creating a lasting culture, which are all founded on shared values.

4.) Make sure you are moving humanity forward.

As I touch on in more depth with How Brands Talk About Themselves Has Never Been More Critical, fulfilling human values is the price of admission to the new social marketplace. Great mission statements concern themselves with advancing the human condition. More on this at the above link.

5.) Create a mission that communicates a culture and ideology, not a product.

Again, while the best mission statements and value propositions are crafted by great marketers, they are not marketing products, but rather cultural artifacts. John Locke first posited that “government governs at the consent of the governed” in 1676. It took another hundred years for the business case to develop that would fulfill the human value — government of the people, by the people and for the people, i.e., the Declaration of Independence.

It took another 13 years for the product (the US Constitution) and the customer (we, the people) to get fully ironed out. That’s because cultures need to have a universal language through which to communicate. Whether you are creating bicameral legislatures or WYSIWYGs, your team has to have a common mode of communication. Balanced businesses achieve this through both empirical metrics, which measure how customers interact, and empathic metrics, which measure why.

One of the hallmarks of our methodology is that it takes the product development loops of Lean (build, measure, learn) and Design Thinking (define, design, refine) and makes them three dimensional, creating Culture-Language-Product loops. The value proposition is the foundation of your culture, but in order for it to animate your product, you need to establish a common language, so you can continually measure how you’re not only producing great products, but fulfilling shared values.