That’s a big part of why they’re bullshit. A decade later, a management journal announced, “Developing a mission statement is an important first step in the strategic planning process.” But by the nineteen-nineties corporate mission statements had moved from the realm of strategic planning to public relations. “We are on the verge of mission madness,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1979. Before long, as higher education was becoming corporatized, mission statements crept into university life.
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(The TV show “Mission: Impossible” débuted in 1966.) After 1973, and at the urging of the management guru Peter Drucker, businesses started writing mission statements as part of the process of “strategic planning,” another expression Drucker borrowed from the military. called going to the moon an “untried mission.” “Mission statements” date to the Vietnam War, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff began drafting ever-changing objectives for a war known for its purposelessness. Scientific and military missions-and the expression “mission accomplished”-date to about the First World War. In the seventeenth century, when “mission” first conveyed something secular, it meant diplomacy: emissaries undertake missions. The word “mission” comes from the Latin for “send.” In English, historically, a mission is Christian, and means sending the Holy Spirit out into the world to spread the Word of God: a mission involves saving souls. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Both versions, like most mission statements, are baloney. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.įacebook has a save-the-world mission statement-“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”-that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican.