Another pearl of wisdom from The End of Business was to keep things simple. Their point was that mission statements don’t mean anything to anybody and challenged you to write your mission statement in 8 words or less.
I decided to take up this challenge. Here are random mission statements compliments of Google. You decide – do 8 words still get the point across? Or do we lose something in the translation :
“This company leverages SharePoint to facilitate the sharing of information across geographical locations and to encourage staff to share ideas and thoughts on keeping our company a cutting edge supplier. We welcome innovative thinking in using SharePoint to streamline business processes to reduce the time to market on our products”.
Faster products, shared ideas, change through innovative thinking.
“To leverage the tools and resources that SharePoint technologies provide using existing infrastructure technologies such as Active Directory, Exchange, Microsoft Office, and other tools such as Performance Point and Project Server services. Enable the tools necessary to rapidly respond to business needs, enrich collaborative interaction by empowering the user the ability to share, create, and connect with University constituents and federated partners more effectively.”
Combining technologies allows users to collaborate effectively everywhere.
“This project seeks to implement SharePoint as an enterprise collaboration environment. Because SharePoint will fulfill a mission-critical role at the Organization, it must be conceived, deployed, and operated according to best practices, corporate policies, regulatory constraints, and in concert with other Organization initiatives.”
Aligning SharePoint to company initiatives and corporate governance.
“Our mission is to deliver superior, leading edge, SharePoint solutions that enable our customers to solve real business problems pragmatically and cost-effectively.”
Empowering customers through automated, cost-effective SharePoint solutions.
“The steering committee will provide a unified, centrally governed approach to the SharePoint environment. This team has the overriding authority for all architectural, design and development decisions, including all policies and procedures created for the SharePoint environment. It will strongly influence foundational and framework-related issues, as well as decisions regarding security and retention considerations for the deployment.”
Steering SharePoint into the future with total ownership.
Try it with yours and see how you do.
Views from Veronique 
Thank you Zee.
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NICE Post!
zee
http://walisystems.com
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@Patrick, you raised some very valid points, but how often are mission statements really measured in real life. Starting a statement from scratch then instead of trying to streamline and old (useless) one, is a much smarter idea! I found the whole 8 word concept interesting and I’m glad you offered a sensible alternative. PS : on the places you mentioned – yep, I’d say that qualifies as everywhere for sure. 🙂 Smart phones and iPads make that all possible. It counts for geographically dispersed as well as mobile people.
@Marlon, keeping it real!!
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I don’t agree with this. Well, I do agree the 8 word test is an interesting test to do, but for me the most important message in a mission statement, is that it makes sense and that is can be measured. Measured as in I can put a KPI on it and we don’t have to discuss for hours to define this KPI.
And I do have a feeling, that the 8-words mission statements you have written down, will have a lot of discussion on how to define the KPI. (and yes, the source where you create these 8 words mission statements from is not a good one, because these missions statements are big-time platitudes, hence useless). So they mean just as less as the large mission statements.
The first one : “Faster products, shared ideas, change through innovative thinking.” will probably be one of the easiest (read less difficult) ones to define KPIs. The others are very wide and open to a lot of discussion. Not only a discussion on the KPI, but also on specific words that are mentioned in these mission statements. e.g. if you want to identify a KPI on “collaborate everywhere”, you first will have a discussion on the definition of collaboration for your company and how you can achieve and measure this (compared to the current collaboration they already do). Everywhere might seem pretty obvious, but is also open to a lot of discussion. Are these places also considered as being a part of everywhere: “The toilet, the airplane, train, hotel room,…” Just to make a difference between on-line and off-line collaboration.
So, I like to 8-word thought, but for me it is just a game and it is more important to not talk bullsh|t in the mission statement and make is measurable.
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Hence my mission…IT through IT… (Information Technology through Innovative Thinking:)
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[…] SharePoint Mission Statements in 8 Words or Less Another pearl of wisdom from The End of Business was to keep things simple. Their point was that mission statements don’t mean anything to anybody and challenged you to write your mission statement in 8 words or less. I decided … Continue reading → Read More… […]
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