Have you seen the most recent ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie?  Well, what’s harder than jumping off a cliff on a motorcycle is: writing a mission statement. We tried it…
The Knot's company principles.
Dollars & Sense
What we can learn about a company through its mission statement.
This past week, I read a mission statement from The Knot's corporate website (https://www.theknotww.com/). The statement included a paragraph and five principles. The paragraph describes what the parent company does. The statement says:
"We help couples around the world navigate and enjoy life’s biggest moments together. As a global company, our industry-leading websites, top-ranked mobile apps, and trusted resources provide the most sought-after information, connections, and services to engaged couples, newlyweds, and first-time parents everywhere."
Then they list these mission statement principles:
- We dream big.
- We love our users.
- We do the right thing.
- We hustle every day.
- We win together.
I feel that mission statement should be unique to the organization. It should not be able to be applied widely to most other entities.
Hiring
Sometimes a company's principles are designed to draw in job applicants (and not truly differentiate the company from others). Job applicants want to work for a company that "dreams big". Hiring is hard, and I believe that crafting principles to encourage job applicants is a deft move. If The Knot gains even just a few more job applicants from these principles, these principles succeeded.
Mission: Write a Statement
I asked my team what our principles would be. What do we stand for? Even if it's to, ahem, discreetly attract new hires, what would our principles include? I propose these:
- We support local communities.
- We believe in the power of collaboration and teamwork. In sum: We > Me.
- We believe in public service.
- We believe in technology to improve our customers' businesses.
- We believe in American ideals, including the free market. We believe in a free market with multiple players because this often produces the best results for all members of it, from the customers to the businesses providing services.
- We believe that sometimes one has to pay more to do the right thing. This entails when paying for products, wages, and even taxes.
- We believe in reading, writing, and education.
One could ask: are the above principles unique to Shop Local or could any company place these in its website's footer? I now see that creating a unique set of principles is harder than it appears. What one says—or leaves out—says something. It's important which principles we choose to list.
Homework:
- Please consider the principles that you would list for your company or organization.
To our Team, thank you for hustling each day to materialize our ideals.
Tags:
mission statement
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