Forget The Mission Statement. What’s Your
Mission Question?
Warren Berger taps some of the most
powerful CEOs to reveal the questions that will keep any company
on track.
Most companies, of course,
articulate their missions by way of formal “statements.” But often they’re
banal pronouncements (We save people money so they can live better.
--WalMart) or debatable assertions (Yahoo! is the premier digital media
company) that don’t offer much help in trying to gauge whether a company is
actually living up to a larger goal or purpose.
These are questions that zero in on
the higher purpose of a company.
Questions, on the other hand, can
provide a reality check on whether or not a business is staying true to what it
stands for and aims to achieve. So herewith, derived from interviews for my
forthcoming book, A More Beautiful Question, are thoughts from a couple of top CEOs (Panera Bread’s Ron
Shaich and Patagonia’s Casey Sheahan) and a trio of leading business
thinkers/consultants (the Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, Peer
Insight’s Tim Ogilvie, and SY Partners’ Keith Yamashita). The following five
“mission questions” are designed to keep a business focused on what matters
most.
Over time, companies can lose sight
of what they first set out to do. Even a company like Patagonia--with a much
stronger, well-defined mission than most--has to ask the above question on a
regular basis, according to Patagonia CEO Casey Sheahan. “There is great
tension every day in the company between being successful in terms of growth,
and what this means in terms of our environmental impact,” he says. And the
bigger Patagonia gets, the more challenging that becomes: Sheahan says he
grapples with the question, “How can we minimize that [environmental] impact
given that there is a tremendous carbon footprint operating a $570 million
business?”
But what helps guide the company at
all times is the knowledge that “we arose out of our love of nature and the
wilderness,” as Sheahan puts it. “When the company was started, it was
basically about protecting what we love, growing to expand our sphere of
influence, and trying to inspire other companies.” Not only is that the reason
Patagonia exists--it’s also the reason people come to work there. “It’s why
they’re going up the stairs two steps at a time to get to their jobs,” Sheahan
says. “When I’m talking to people at the company and start out talking about how
our sales are increasing--and then I say something like, ‘By the way, we’re
sending 50 people down to the Gulf to help with the cleanup efforts down
there’--suddenly people are on their feet cheering. That’s why they’re
here.”
Not every company has an environmental
mission like that, but Sheahan maintains that “for any organization, it is
galvanizing to have a strong purpose and values, no matter what they might be.”
And a good way to surface that is by looking back to when the business was
founded and asking: What was that higher purpose at the outset? And how can
we rally people around that today?
Where you can’t serve both the
bottom line and the cause, one must suffer.
This was the question that Panera’s
Ron Shaich wrestled with a few years ago, and it led to the launch of Panera
Cares--an initiative to open a number of pay-what-you-can cafés that are
identical to the chain’s other restaurants, except customers pay what they wish
or can afford (based on suggested donation amounts).
Of course, with so much fresh-baked
bread in so many outlets, Panera has always been “uniquely able” to provide
leftover bread to people in need--and the company has, for years, been a major
contributor to community food pantries, giving away in excess of $100 million
worth a year. “But then we started asking ourselves, What more can we do?”
Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.” What
gradually became clear was that Panera was in a position to provide not just
bread giveaways but a more complete and dignified eating experience for those
dealing with food insecurity. The first Panera Cares café opened about two
years ago. Now there are five around the country, serving over a million people
(and, for the most part, covering costs, as high donations from some customers
tend to balance out lower ones by others).
Shaich notes that as the company was
developing the Panera Cares idea and putting it into practice (with the CEO
himself logging about 100 hours working on location at the first café), the
company made a number of tough choices to try to ensure the integrity of the
program: offering a full menu instead of a limited one, using donation boxes at
the cafés instead of cash registers (Shaich was concerned that the latter could
create psychological pressure to pay). At each step, Shaich says, the company
had to ask: Do we want to take a shortcut on this, or do it right?
As Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie
observes, being true to a mission or cause often requires making tough
decisions. It’s not surprising that smart businesses today would rather be seen
as a “cause, not just a company,” he says--after all, discriminating consumers
and talented employees are drawn to brands and companies that share their
values and that seem to stand for something worthwhile. But the only way to do
this credibly is by sacrificing at times. “When you come to the point where you
can’t serve both the bottom line and the cause, one or the other must suffer,”
says Ogilvie, who points to the example of Whole Foods being willing to stop
selling live lobsters for an extended period until it could find a supplier
that did humane harvesting. “Those are hard choices, but when you opt for the
cause over the bottom line, employees can see that,” Ogilvie says, “and then
they believe in the company and the cause even more.”
Patagonia has demonstrated that it
is willing to risk losing sales in support of the larger mission: For example,
the company decided (famously) to run ads urging people not to buy its
clothing (or at least, not to buy a new jacket if you didn’t actually need it).
Says Sheahan: “Those ads were just asking people to question their consumerism
and maybe be a little more mindful about the stuff they’re purchasing.” Still,
it was a high-risk message at the time--though in the end, Sheahan says, it
actually helped the brand gain market share by attracting more customers (who
presumably admired the stand Patagonia was taking with the ads).
Panera’s Shaich says it’s easy to
lose sight of the big picture when company leaders start caring too much about
quarterly financial results. “The reality is, shareholder value or stock price
is not something you can create anyway,” Shaich maintains. “It’s a by-product
that only happens if you make a difference in people’s lives.” And you can only
do that, he adds, by continually asking mission-related questions--about what
truly matters to you as a company and what’s needed in the marketplace or the
larger world.
But unfortunately, says Clayton
Christensen of the Harvard Business School, many business leaders have been
trained to care obsessively about short-term results--specifically, he says,
they tend to put too much weight on financial metrics like IRR (internal rate
of return) and ROCE (return on capital employed) because they’ve been
conditioned to treat capital as precious. In reality, Christensen points out,
“Capital today is abundant and cheap” (so much so, he notes, that “investors
had to pay Square for the privilege” of having the hot startup take their
funding). With so much available capital, it’s an opportune time for companies
to invest in expansive, game-changing innovation--and in “people who have the
skills to solve not only today’s problems but to ask what tomorrow’s challenges
will be,” Christensen says.
Businesses have remained focused on
what Christensen calls 'efficiency innovations.'
Yet many businesses have remained
focused on what Christensen calls “efficiency innovations” (aimed at reducing
costs) in order to free up more capital, which in turn is used to create more
efficiency. How to break this cycle? Christensen thinks tax incentives for
long-term investment may help, but he also believes, like Shaich, that business
leaders must step back and ask: What do we actually care about, beyond
today’s stock price or short-term return on capital? What are we trying to
achieve and how will we get there, in the long run?
Mission statements are usually
handed down from on high (and most of them read as if cobbled together by an
executive committee). But does a mission mean anything if the people throughout
the company don’t feel invested in it?
One way to help employees feel more
engaged with a company mission is to give them a role in actually shaping it or
refreshing an existing one. Keith Yamashita observes that some companies choose
to involve many people in the crafting of the mission, while others leave it to
the leadership--“to me, there’s no right or wrong way,” he says. But he does
note that being involved in the mission creation--“doing the
introspection--gets people to more firmly and more deeply believe in what they
are doing.”
Figuring out what you want to
accomplish is a continual search. Questions are the means.
Yamashita points to the approach
used by Starbucks in modernizing its mission a few years back. CEO Howard
Schultz worked with his top leaders to rewrite every word of the mission. That
team then convened the top 300 leaders of the company to get them to commit to
it; and they in turn went to more than 12,000 store managers, who spent four
days in New Orleans committing to the mission. “This is a great example of
mission-setting, starting with a few key leaders and ultimately rallying an
entire workforce,” Yamashita says.
A different approach by IBM under
then-CEO Sam Palmisano sought even more direct input upfront, Yamashita notes.
Palmisano “hosted a worldwide online jam session--using technology to elicit the ideas, thinking, and
stories from IBMers about what they most valued,” Yamashita says. More than
80,000 employees participated--and together, they wrote the company’s values,
which remain in place under current CEO Ginni Rometty.
Shaich says that at Panera ideas
about how to live up to the mission can come from anywhere. For example, the
Panera Cares idea originated during a dinner conversation between Shaich and a
group of franchisees--one of whom raised a question about how the company might
expand upon its efforts to serve the community. That got Shaich thinking about
ways to elevate the company’s existing bread-donation program to a higher level.
Whether mission questions come from
throughout the ranks or are posed by leaders themselves, the point is to keep
asking, What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How might we do it better?
As Shaich says: “Figuring out what you want to accomplish is a continual
search--and questions are the means to the search.”
Written by: Warren Berger http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672137/forget-the-mission-statement-whats-your-mission-question
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