Mission statement masters

ManagementSpeak: I operate on a higher value plane than you do.

Translation: My last connection with operational responsibility was too long ago to remember.

As a ManagementSpeak provider, this week's anonymous contributor operates on the highest of value planes.

I've found the perfect mission statement.

No, really. You've heard it, too. Chances are you were too busy drinking beer at the time (as I was) to recognize it as a mission statement.

Yet there it was: "Tastes great, less filling." It's perfect.

Your mission is your brand, or at least it should be. Branding is often confused with name recognition, but a well-managed brand is much more than that. When a business builds a brand, it's establishing the expectations it wants customers to have when doing business with it. That's why the best companies spend more time and effort managing their brand internally than working with their customers. It's to ensure that when marketing makes promises, the company will keep them.

Smart business leaders consider their mission and their brand to be nothing more than opposite sides of the same coin.

Imagine if IT professionals had been put in charge of Miller Lite's brand. "We provide malt-based fermented beverages to the commercial and residential marketplace, delivering the highest quality and lowest caloric intake consistent with our profitability goals by optimizing our supply chain, standardizing the brewing process, and implementing a program of continuous improvement." Aaaughhhh! It's too horrible to contemplate. Think about the expectations you'd set ... or perhaps "expectorations" is a better word.

Did you think that a mission statement had to be long and windy with lots of bullet points? Nope. Those have missed the golden rule of mission statement wordsmithery: Ban the word "by." Once you put "by" into your mission statement, you've moved beyond branding to the executive summary of a white paper on IT operations. Because once you say "by," you're obligated to follow it with every strategy, tactic, operational technique, and whim you might pursue to further your goals. "By" turns a taut mission statement into a flabby, boring bullet list.

So what is your mission? Right about now, "tastes great, less filling" is a pretty good mission statement for many IT organizations, as useful as it is for branding barley pop. Think about adopting that exact phrasing. Or if your corporate culture is less whimsical, change it to "Lower costs, better technology," assuming, of course, that it fits what you're trying to accomplish.

Learn from the brand masters. When it comes to your mission, limit yourself to five words or less.

Then promote the daylights out of it -- especially inside your own organization.