"The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment."
As you may or may not already know, I regard mission statements as the quintessential example of middle manager masturbation. A group of executives or managers or board members or whathaveyou meets with an expensive consultant who could not perform a single really useful task if his life depended on it and, with solemnity and reverence, gather around a table to ask themselves the question: what is it we do?
Remember-- there are useful things that people do. Install an Oracle Server. Repair a defective furnace. Replace the battery in a car. And then there are consultants.
Now, if a company like McDonald's came out with a mission statement like "we provide crappy, cheap, non-nutritious food to vulnerable and foolish customers to maximize return on shareholder's investment in our company, regardless of the social, medical, or cultural cost", I would be all in favor of mission statements. A mission statement like that could be regarded as a useful piece of information about a company.
Some other possible examples:
"We provide the public with sexually attractive women and men to read ridiculously facile and trivial accounts of news events while maximizing the public tolerance for incessant commercial interruption" (CNN)
"We do extensive research and promotion to find out exactly how to market expensive but dangerous mind-altering drugs to a credulous public that actually believes their problems can be cured with a little pill. If absolutely necessary, we will actually pay for research to develop drugs of dubious efficacy. It is imperative to foster the conviction that if one drug "fails" the solution is always another drug." (Pharmaceutical Company).
"We sell the public glamourized images of unimportant people who are well-known for being well-known and whom the public aspire to emulate precisely because they can't be them because they aren't in the magazine." (People Magazine)
"We will cheat and lie and defraud people in order to obtain the maximum amount of personal material benefit for our top executives" (Enron Corporation).
"We will attack and invade Iraq so that a plentiful supply of oil will be available for our future needs especially if those bozos in Saudi Arabia fail to keep the fanatic Moslem hoards in check". (U.S. government).
But look at the New York Times mission statement. Can you believe they used the word "enhance" in their mission statement? That they said "enhance society"? What kind of vacuous tripe is this? Enhance Society? It sounds like something a Grade 10 student could improve upon. "Schools enhance society by providing something for young people to do when they are not on drugs or vandalizing schools."
Then they use the phrase "high-quality". "High-quality news, information, and entertainment". At least someone realized that "quality news" is grammatically incorrect, even if almost everybody, including the Minister of Education in Ontario (we wish to provide the children of Ontario with a quality education).. Instead, they fell back upon the merely incomprehensible. What is "high-quality"? The mission statement doesn't say. If it did say, then it would actually be specific. It would have content and meaning. But the goal of devising a mission statement is to emasculate language of all content and meaning so that everyone can sign on to it.
Whenever someone at one of these meetings actually proposes a specific statement against which any particular activities or achievements can be measured, the consultant, and other participants, are sure to have a panic attack. The danger of specific statements of quantifiable details, of course, is that it be revealed to people that either you haven't fulfilled your mission, or that you have fulfilled your mission but your mission sucks, or is unimportant, or isn't something remarkably useful in any case.
I'll bet that none of the reporters at the New York Times had any hand in this mission statement. It's too incomprehensibly dumb to believe that someone like Seymour Hersh could have signed on to it.
Your mission statement is usually created with the assistance of an outside consultant. The assumption is that nobody on your staff knows what the hell you do, so you better bring in someone who is unfamiliar with the organization to lead the effort.
Is that what the mighty New York Times did? I hope not. It's something CNN or United States and World Report would do.
Copyright © 2002 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
