Should companies and individuals worry about a mission statement?

 I have a different opinion from Mr. Morley (on Quora). IME people want something valuable to spend their lives doing. Living from wage to wage, “Level One Techniques” of rewards and punishments is not enough. Working hard to make someone else rich is not it. Most companies use rewards and punishments as their primary means of employment and control. Yet non-profit organizations are able to get huge pools of energy out of people not because of rewards, but because of a sense of purpose.

I conclude that executives without a robust and inspiring “charter” are negligent or lazy or simply habitually falling back on what they know. All of this is a function of VABEs. What are VABEs? Kahneman received a Nobel Prize for the concept that people make huge decisions based on their beliefs over evidence and data. In other words, VABEs “trump” data.

Every human makes a choice to either develop a plan for their lives or to live from day to day reacting to what’s happening around them. The latter drift. The former often do great things.

I developed the concept of a charter over 40 years researching, consulting and teaching worldwide. A Charter begins with a one sentence, inspiring mission statement. BAES: “We protect those who protect us.” VDOT: “Keep Virginia Moving.” Coca-Cola: “Refresh the World.” Sallie Mae: “We make education affordable for everyone.”

If you give the drafting of a mission statement to a committee, six months later they will arrive at “we deliver world-class goods and services that delight our customers beyond their expectations and yield an above-industry average return to our investors.” It’s vanilla, uninspiring, undifferentiating from any other corporation.

Many executives confuse and conflate “mission” and “vision.” The first is “what we do” and the second is “where we are going.” Getting that distinction seems beyond most executives (in my experience). But there’s more.

What do we stand for? HOW do we do business? And HOW are we going to get to our vision? And what will we measure? And most importantly WHO is going to make these decisions / determinations? IF no one does, the organization will drift and it’s members will be confused and focused on their wages—not some purpose that they believe in.

I also think individuals should, like every company, have a robust and inspiring charter IF they want to have direction and focus to their lives and to feel good about what they are doing with their limited 164 hours a week or ~640,000 hours of life. It’s your life, you can decide, you DO decide whether to live it intentionally or “outside-in” reacting to the momentary forces around you.

I have a personal charter. I had a charter for my academic team—and was told after our first annual review with the dean that our area (out of ten) was “by far the best prepared.” I had a charter for my 8 years as CEO of a 3,000 person/8 unit non-profit organization. After 8 years our performance was applauded by all.

People live “outside-in” IME because of lazy minds or the fear of rejection. In some sense, any society depends on obedience and conformity. Leaders, however, must live more ”inside-out” than “outside-in.” Most people don’t do that. Largely because of the repetition of habits they learned as defenseless children. Very few find the courage to “rise above” their early childhood conditioning to assert their view on the world around them.

For more see my website at Level Three Leadership

BTW, my personal “mission” in life is “to help people find themselves.” This grew out of my history of having had three last names—and applied to everything I have done in life: marriage, parenting, researching, teaching, consulting, writing, and now in retirement, still writing and weekly Quora responses.

In the end, again, it’s your life. You can choose to live it “outside-in” in reaction or “inside-out” creating what you want to do with your life, something you believe in and with which you can see a vision of what you could become. It’s up to you. You are the Captain of your ship. (Abramoff, “It’s Your Ship”)

Will you ever become anything more than a vessel transmitting the genes and VABEs of previous generations on to the next? (Csikszentmihalyi “The Evolving Self”)