I was writing an article this weekend and went in search of a publicly traded tech corporation’s mission statement.
What I found was an About page with 7 sections. Not only were they disparate, but each one, standing alone, was vague and confusing.
To be fair, I likely don’t know the jargon well enough to conclude what is clear and what isn’t to a tech-oriented visitor to the website, but I know bad writing when I see it.
For instance, does this tell you what a company actually does?
“Leverage our core competencies to ideate scalable solutions that move the needle.”
I’ve read versions of that sentence a hundred times, and I still couldn’t tell you what the company’s target market is.
Don’t make your mission statement clear as mud. (When writing, you can use idioms if they are clear, short, and everyone knows what they mean. Okay, maybe I just made that rule up.)
Make your mission statement informative, useful, readable, and succinct. Make it exceptional. Google’s mission statement is known as the gold standard in the tech world. “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Even if you aren’t a tech company, it pays to reevaluate your mission statement.
Here are some notable examples from other industries:
Disney: “To make people happy.”
Vanguard: “To take a stand for all investors, to treat them fairly, and to give them the best chance for investment success.”
Harvard: “To educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.”
Start by looking at your competition. What can you learn from their mission statements? How does yours stack up?
