The Words on the Wall
I’ve never been a big believer in corporate mission statements.
Actually, that’s being generous. I think most of them suck.
You know the kind. Some collection of carefully chosen words about integrity, excellence, innovation, customer satisfaction, and becoming the world’s leading whatever. The result of an expensive retreat where executives and consultants spend days debating language that will eventually be printed on a plaque, hung on a wall, and largely forgotten.
The words are usually fine. Sometimes they’re even inspiring.
But there’s a problem.
They often describe the company leadership wishes it had rather than the company employees actually experience.
I’ve been in plenty of businesses where the disconnect becomes obvious almost immediately. The mission statement celebrates customer service, but the employees seem annoyed that customers keep interrupting their work. It promises empowerment, but nobody can make a decision without three levels of approval. It talks about respect and accountability, but everyone knows which people are allowed to behave badly without consequences.
The mission statement isn’t necessarily wrong about what the company should be doing.
It’s just not describing what the company is doing.
That’s corporate theater.
But a longtime friend of mine, someone I consider one of my personal heroes, has made me reconsider whether the problem is really the mission statement itself.
He’s built an extraordinarily successful business in a notoriously difficult industry. We’ve talked about him before in I Don’t Buckle and You Can’t Outpay Amazon. What fascinates me isn’t simply his success, but how he has managed to build an organization where people understand what matters, seem genuinely invested in doing it, and often stay for years in an industry where leaving is remarkably easy.
During a recent conversation, he explained that he had worked for several large corporations before building his own business. They all had mission and vision statements, and he thought they were terrible.
Too long. Too complicated. People read them once, put them on the wall, and never thought about them again.
When he built his own organization, he wanted something different. Something simple enough that everyone, from the newest employee to the most senior executive, could understand and remember.
One of his guiding ideas was to wow every customer, every time.
And then came the observation that stuck with me:
“Okay is not a wow.”
That’s wonderfully simple. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the simplicity of the words wasn’t what impressed me.
It was the organization behind them.
The Part I Wasn’t Good At
Years ago, when I was running our family’s manufacturing business, Captive Plastics, I was pretty good at figuring out where I wanted the company to go.
I could dig into a direction, work through the problems, and keep fighting until it worked or I discovered a better approach. I was comfortable challenging assumptions, changing strategies, and making difficult decisions when circumstances demanded them.
But communicating that direction throughout the organization?
That wasn’t one of my strengths.
I could see what I wanted to accomplish. I could work through the reasoning, understand the trade-offs, and become convinced that a particular direction was the right one. The problem was that all of that thinking was happening inside my head.
And everyone else didn’t have the benefit of living there.
What seemed perfectly obvious to me wasn’t necessarily obvious to the people expected to make it happen. They might understand their particular responsibilities without understanding the larger objective. They might execute a plan without knowing why we had chosen it or what would cause us to change direction.
There’s a fundamental difference between knowing where you want to go and getting an entire organization to understand why you’re going there.
I wasn’t naturally gifted at the second part.
Looking back, I can recognize that as one of the many things I could have done better. Having a clear direction is valuable, but if the people around you don’t understand it, much of that clarity is trapped inside the leader.
And the larger the organization becomes, the more consequential that limitation can be.
You can’t personally make every decision. You can’t explain every situation to every employee. Eventually, the organization has to function based on a shared understanding of what matters.
That takes something more than a leader with conviction.
It takes a culture.
And this is where I admire my friend enormously. He seems to possess an ability that I recognize I didn’t have to the same degree: making what matters understandable to the people around him.
Not through some elaborate philosophical explanation, but through simple expectations, conversations, and behavior repeated over time.
I still don’t think a beautifully written mission statement would have solved my problem at Captive Plastics. You can’t substitute a few inspirational sentences for the hard work of communicating, reinforcing, and demonstrating a direction.
But perhaps there’s a place for those sentences once the organization already understands what they’re supposed to mean.
The Five-Minute Test
Here’s my theory.
You should be able to walk into almost any business, spend five minutes talking with someone who works there, and develop a pretty good sense of its culture.
Not a carefully selected executive trained to deliver the corporate message. Not someone in human resources whose job includes explaining company values.
Just someone doing their job.
Ask them about the business. What makes it different? What matters around here? What happens when something goes wrong? What do people take pride in? How does management treat employees?
You don’t even need to ask about the mission statement.
In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.
Because what you’re trying to discover isn’t whether employees have memorized a collection of words. You’re trying to discover whether they share an understanding of what the organization actually values.
And I think you’ll encounter two very different kinds of businesses.
In the first, the answers sound disconnected from the mission statement hanging on the wall. Employees may know what leadership says the company believes, but their experiences tell a different story.
The company celebrates empowerment, but employees explain how difficult it is to get approval for even simple decisions. Leadership talks about accountability, but everyone knows that some people are held to different standards. The mission statement promises exceptional customer service, but the systems and incentives reward getting customers out of the way as quickly as possible.
Ask enough questions, and you begin to understand the actual culture.
It isn’t the one on the wall.
In the second kind of business, something quite different happens.
People seem genuinely excited to tell you about where they work. They can explain what matters without struggling to remember the approved language. They tell stories about how customers are treated, how problems get solved, and what the company expects from everyone.
And sometimes they’ll even bring up the mission statement.
Not because they’re required to recite it, but because it gives them a convenient way to explain something they’re already experiencing.
Oh, yeah, we have this mission statement. It actually does a pretty good job of explaining how we do things around here.
That’s a very different relationship between a company and its words.
In one organization, the culture is expected to conform to the mission statement. In the other, the mission statement describes the culture.
The first can become corporate theater. The second can be authentic.
And you can often tell the difference in five minutes.
Of course, five minutes won’t reveal everything. An organization can have wonderful employees working inside a terrible culture, and a single unhappy employee doesn’t necessarily represent the entire business.
But spend a little time with several people, and patterns begin to emerge.
The language might be different, but the underlying understanding is remarkably consistent. People know what matters, and more importantly, their experiences suggest those things actually matter to the organization.
That’s the real test.
Not whether everyone can repeat the same words, but whether everyone can describe the same reality.
When Nobody Is Watching
There’s a final dimension to this that I find particularly interesting.
My friend’s approach to building culture isn’t all about making people feel good.
He’s equally comfortable talking about accountability.
He believes people should understand what’s expected of them, be recognized when they do well, and be told directly when they don’t.
In our conversation, he described being able to look someone in the eye and tell them, in considerably more colorful language than most corporate handbooks would permit, that they’d screwed up.
But the important part was the relationship surrounding that conversation.
If people believe you care about them, respect them, and genuinely want them to succeed, they can accept an uncomfortable conversation. The criticism doesn’t automatically become a personal attack.
That doesn’t mean accountability is always easy. It means the culture has created an environment where accountability is understood as part of the relationship rather than something imposed from above.
And that’s what separates a value people actually live from a value somebody merely wrote down.
It’s easy to put accountability in a mission statement.
It’s considerably harder to build an organization where people expect it from one another, including from leadership.
The same is true of customer service, integrity, respect, or any of the other familiar words that appear on corporate walls.
They only become meaningful when they influence behavior.
And perhaps the most important test is what happens when nobody from leadership is watching.
Does the employee make the decision that serves the customer, even when there’s an easier alternative? Does the manager address a problem rather than quietly passing it along? Does someone admit a mistake because fixing it matters more than protecting their ego?
Those everyday decisions reveal what the company really believes.
A mission statement can’t make them happen. At best, it gives people a simple way to articulate the principles already guiding their behavior.
That doesn’t mean a mission statement can’t help shape a developing culture. Of course it can. Organizations evolve, and clearly expressed expectations can help people understand the direction leadership wants to take.
But there’s an important difference between using words to reinforce a culture you’re actively building and imagining that writing the words somehow creates the culture.
Leadership’s job isn’t simply to get employees to live up to the mission statement. It’s to make the mission statement true.
Only then does it become something other than theater.
Which brings me back to my friend and his wonderfully simple observation.
“Okay is not a wow.”
On its own, it’s just another slogan. Shorter than most, certainly more memorable, but still just words.
What makes it remarkable is an organization where people understand what those words mean and have been encouraged to make them real through their everyday decisions.
The statement didn’t create that understanding on its own. Years of leadership, relationships, expectations, and accountability did.
The words simply made it easier to explain.
And perhaps that’s where I’ve come around, at least a little, on mission statements.
I still think most of them suck.
But maybe I’ve been judging the wrong thing.
The question isn’t whether the mission statement is well written, inspiring, or sufficiently concise to fit on a coffee mug.
It’s whether the people working in the organization recognize themselves in it.
If they don’t, you’ve probably written a description of something you wish existed.
If they do, you’ve accomplished something far more difficult than writing a mission statement.
You’ve built a culture.
And you can usually discover that without ever reading a word on the wall.
That’s a WOW.
🌱 Seed Thought: A mission statement shouldn’t describe the company you wish you had. It should give people the words to explain the culture you’ve already built.
