Over the years, I’ve been asked to facilitate a lot of companies’ retreats, where a great deal of mission statement creation or updating takes place. The more time passes, the more I find mission statement generating a waste of time. I’m ashamed to have been an instrument in the creation of many of them.
It’s not that I think the concept itself is worthless. It’s that most mission statements I’ve seen–both those I’ve facilitated the creation of and those I’ve wandered by–are watered down, boring, even cryptic. They say a lot about nothing. They’re watered down because the people writing them mistake compromise for collaboration. As a result, it’s pretty darn hard to rally behind most of them.
I decline the request for most of this kind of work these days, unless the organization is ready to do some startling, truly creative and risky work and is willing to creatively engage the kind of important conversations necessary for a great mission statement.
And so I’m delighted that I can now refer organizations I’m declining to a website that can simply generate their mission statement for them. No money, no time, just the click of a button. The mission statements generated are at least as irrelevant as a lot of the ones I see out there. Have some fun at the Dilbert.com Mission Statement Generator.
Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
