Mission Statement

A mission statement is simply a statement of the purpose of your company or business or organization. What do you want to do for people? Do you want to make things more convenient in some way? Do you want to make some need met more cheaply or easily? Do you want to make something work better? Just what is it you're up to.

Some mission statements are deficient in the framing of them which undermines their impact. I was in a presentation when a team of several young MBA students at Drexel University here in Philadelphia presented their idea for making aging more "fun." They had studied the needs of older people and noticed that some of the things they had to do could be made easier by having larger print that would be easier to read. They said their product would make aging more fun.

Fun? Ask a person in his or her 80s how much fun aging is. Maybe aging could be made less daunting. But more fun--good luck with that. The students team's hearts were in the right places but their framing needs some reworking.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Mission Statement

A mission statement is "a brief [written] statement of the purpose of a company, organization, or group, according to Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia." I added the part about being written down. It's crucial that it be written down.

In a sense a mission statement is a promise the entrepreneur makes to the world of what the entrepreneur sees possible and what specific actions he or she intends to take to bring it about.

Hildy Gottlieb, in "3 Statements That Can Change the World: Mission/Vision/Values", www.Help4NonProfits.com (2007), says,

To distinguish between Vision and Mission...add the letters 'ary' to the end of each word: Vision-ary and Mission-ary....A visionary is someone who sees what is possible, who sees the potentisl. A missionary is someone who carries out that work.

I cannot overemphasize that both the vision statement and the mission statement be written down. When you write it down you own it. You can tape it up on the wall in front of your desk. You can keep it in a notebook for future reference. You can use it in your communications. You can use it to train employees and board members. If you don't write it down, you can't do any of these things. You can't share it. Instead you can mislead yourself and be fuzzy in your thinking with others.

What do you think? I would like to hear from you, so post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs everything I do. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.