I used to think mission statements were stupid
I was running online marketing… my main goal was user acquisition. We were doing quite well against that goal through SEM, SEO, social, and optimizing NPS for word of mouth growth.
Over the years on the marketing team, I’d end up in conversations about our mission statement or our positioning statement and I would usually groan a little bit. We’d spend hours going back and forth over existential questions like “who are we” and “why are we doing this?”. I wanted to leave every meeting where we talked about the pros and cons of a single word for an hour. I found it to be distracting from my core goal and so I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I didn’t see how it would help me achieve my goals. Now that I’m in VC I have seen the real purpose of the mission statement and I never understood it back then.
A mission statement is critical for recruiting.
Maybe this is obvious to people already, but I had never fully internalized how critical it is to recruiting world-class talent. A-players have lots of options and need more than just extrinsic motivators to take a job and dedicate their life to it. They need strong intrinsic motivators as well, a strong sense of purpose. How motivated do you think Zynga employees are to copy the latest hot game and optimize the hell out of virtual pigs and goats? See Zynga’s brain drain.
Now that I examine more companies I see the mission statement as a substantial differentiator. If a company can clearly articulate their mission, they have a huge edge on recruiting. Look at some of the statements on the career pages below.
Facebook - Make the world more open and connected.
Tesla Motors - Tesla’s goal is to accelerate the world’s transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric vehicles.
McKinsey - Enabled development of cutting edge vaccines.
Votizen - Help us repair democracy.
Inkling - We’re going to change the way an entire generation of people learns.
Twitter - We’re connecting people everywhere to what they find most meaningful.
What do they have in common? They all talk about a mission that makes the world a better place. What’s your mission statement? Is it something that people will rally behind? Is it a cause that will fire people up? It better be if you want to recruit the best.
I’d love to hear your mission statements in the comments.
PS - Just for a little contrast, it’s funny to look at NASA’s career page that begins with “Our work ranges from the everyday operating of our facilities…