Jamie Baker's Library tagged mission → View Popular

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01 Nov 09

The Downsides of Branding - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org

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hbr.org mission

One-minute elevator pitches convey the essence of a business plan, people tweet in 140 characters, and PowerPoint-speak is a new language (all headlines, no verbs). These can be excellent tools to capture attention.

11 Sep 09

How the Army Prepared Me to Work at Google - Frontline Leadership - HarvardBusiness.org

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Googley management mission

Google is a very different environment from the tank platoon I led at the beginning of my Army career. We've got better food, a more relaxed dress code, and a very flat organizational structure. However, the leadership qualities that make an Army officer and a leader of an innovative organization successful have a lot in common
Communicate the mission
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- In an innovative organization roles are often fluid and only roughly defined, so communication of a vision is even more important.
- This attitude translates well to Silicon Valley, which has gathered sharp minds from all corners of the earth and was initially as foreign to me as any country to which I've been.
- Real respect is earned.
- Trust and challenge your soldiers.
- The combination of mutual respect, trust, and a challenging and clearly defined mission has motivated small military units to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Purpose Bigger Than Product - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

excellent article. sense of purpose/mission enable focus. Alignment is crucial

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mission leadership

At its core, it is about being real and idea-driven. Trust is perhaps the most important currency in business, and big ideas may be the only true source of competitive advantage.
Customers simply don't trust institutions as much today.
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- we now live in an "information everywhere" and more transparent world
- Facebook in their pocket and Twitter at their fingertips. This means we hear and see evidence of businesses not walking their talk.
- In order to regain this trust you must simply make sure that all your products, your merchandising, your advertising, your people and the totality of your touch points with consumers sing from the same hymn. And that hymn is what I call purpose
- "altitude creates attitude".
- When you meet people that have a big idea it is almost impossible to be unaffected.
- I firmly believe that the source of human energy and creativity can be found in the distance between where we are and where we'd like to be. It is that creative dissonance that is the entrepreneurial rocket fuel. If human beings could have walked everywhere on the planet I don't believe we would have invented trains, planes and automobiles. So, if you really want to build great companies you need big ideas.
- You need miniature versions of your grand idea so you can validate its parts, and then iterate and tweak constantly.
- I look at purpose as the guiding star. The compass. The soul.
- I think strong conviction and a sense of purpose enables focus, and the biggest culprit of bad performance in a company is lack of focus.
- a business with a clear purpose that is trying to do something remarkably better than the industry norm.

08 Sep 09

Your Employees Have No Clue What Your Company Does - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

value proposition - if it is not clear on the inside, how can it be clear on the outside?

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mission

To test this in your own organization, do what we do with our own firm and with the firms we advise by asking the questions below to a sample of five to 20 employees.
Sometimes the answers are 180 degrees counter to one another even among people working on the same team. Your employees have no clue what you do, or they have a damn hard time explaining it. Either way, it is a problem.
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- Not enough value propositions start with authentic meaning and purpose.
- With purpose comes belief, and with belief comes an easier ability to articulate the customer pitch
- People need to feel that the customer proposition is true and intuitively believe in it.
- With a clear purpose as the starting point, these four points will further clarify your message to customers, align your team's goals with it, and improve your team's ability to articulate it.
- Make sure the articulation is consistent across all marketing collateral to allow on-going evolution. Whenever the message is edited, apply the change across all channels. Understand which materials customers see most frequently and periodically check consistency across all materials.
- Articulating a message that management, employees, and customers all understand is one of the most critical priorities for any effective organization, from an entrepreneurial upstart to a Fortune 500 company. The value proposition is the connection between product development and selling. If your own people do not believe in it and cannot consistently articulate it, what are the chances that customers will get it?

26 Apr 09

3111

The Orance Code - mission statement and values ING Direct

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Book Reviews mission

THE ORANGE CODE

How ING Direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel with a Cause
ING Direct has always strived to be different — a rebel with a cause, if you will — and in doing so, it has become the most successful online banking venture in history.
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- While the idea of a business as a cause — with a brand as its constitution — might seem idealistic and even naive in theory, it’s not anymore.
- It also created a product category where none existed before.
- The original Orange Code is a document that emerged very early in the history of ING Direct. It was created to be a sort of ethical road map, a promise ING Direct made to itself about how it would do business.
- It attached this internal code of conduct to its mission so that every behavior of every member of its team would serve it every day. And then it made customers complicit in that promise by embedding the spirit of the Orange Code in the ING Direct brand, effectively transforming those customers into watchdogs who would keep the enterprise honest. ~
- The best, from a branding point of view, are charismatic leaders: the bosses whose authority comes from an inspiring and genuine sense of purpose, a purpose not served by the status quo as they see it.
- “For a company that is built on a cause, shaped by and with its brand, the leader needs to carry the torch. Our credibility in the marketplace and the confidence of the people we employ can work and be sustained only if the leader can lead a company of people. We too often forget a company is fundamentally a company of people. The passion, the personal sacrifice, the belief that the cause, expressed by a vision, is real and can be actualized must come from the leader.”
- Consumers lit
  this fire for ING Direct, but the fuel came from a value system. This connection between what people needed and what Kuhlmann believed in, more than any other factor, defined for him the way he would have to lead ING Direct: It would be evangelical, and it would be from the heart.
- A calling. ING Direct’s corporate vision statement to lead Americans back to saving was a spiritual beacon for the enterprise, a strategic true north as they built the bank from day one.
- The guts to make it personal. It’s just as essential that this calling comes from a real place. Otherwise, the “calling” can seem like a marketing invention and the boss’s moral authority can be pretty fragile and the leader two-dimensional. The boss can’t be a creation of the mission or a shill for it; he has to be its author, and who he is as a person has to authenticate it.
- A powerful enemy. With no wrong to right, there’s no job for a white knight. But the fact of a broken status quo in retail banking does more than create a business opportunity or a strategic convenience. Having someone to blame for a broken status quo also creates a tremendously effective leadership tool.
- An inner circle. Picking a team is one of a leader’s most basic responsibilities and is too important a task to rely on mere formal interviews and tidy curricula vitae as the bases for making decisions. Motivation and character are the things that separate loyal, enthusiastic workers from paycheck-collecting journeymen.
- The possibility of failure.
- Its own corporate ego could become its most dangerous predator. Crisis is Kuhlmann’s way of keeping the enterprise small in its own collective mind, as if it were a perpetual startup that is just relieved and happy its doors are still open. ~
- The corporate mission statement
- It’s hard to get adrenalized by a multiparagraph puddle of ambiguity, diluted by consensus until it is odorless, flavorless and utterly unthreatening to the status quo. And yet a mission –– a cause –– is one of the most effective leadership tools humans have ever devised
- Groups with clear causes practically self-organize. They organically attract the right kinds of people and turn them into teams. They produce a more empowered employee who knows what’s right, even without a policies and procedures manual.
- Advocate for somebody.
- Mission statements about those served by an organization produce armies
- Make it next to impossible.
- It’s the journey that inspires, and the horizon should always be just out of reach.
- Make it poetry
- The great mission statements are music to hear and read, sticky and difficult to walk away from
- Write it for you.
- If you write it just for the people who show up for work every day, you get the powerful advantage of making it into a battle cry.
- Bring it down from the mountain. Declaring a company’s purpose is a leadership responsibility. Collaborating on it or, worse, delegating it produces a perfect little storm of negative consequences for leadership. Show us a leader who magnanimously gave rank-and-file managers the job of writing a mission statement, and we’ll show you a dusty plaque in the reception area. ~
- Consensus management isn’t very compatible with a young organization on a mission. You can’t have an organization with any real strength or drive if you populate it with conventional people who will just do as they’re told.
- a strong-minded internal sense of purpose and a genuine belief in what ING Direct was trying to do.
- Character and motivation help amplify skills and aptitude
- Competence is a commodity. Sure, you need everyone in an organization to be able to do his or her job reliably and efficiently.
- Don’t just hire –– assemble a cast.
- Manage your business’s culture and that culture will manage your business. To the outside observer, ING Direct’s operating style can seem chaotic. Decisions seem provisional, and they’re often made in a way that goes far beyond consultation. On the surface, this might seem like some kind of forced collegiality, but it’s not. It’s a way of making sure that everyone’s input is heard publicly. That, in turn, forces the team to consider and care about the team. It eliminates silos not only functionally, but also culturally. And it promotes accountability to one another as well as to the cause.
- Make everybody a hero. Any revolution, even a business
- Think of advertising as the boss talking. Today’s consumers –– and today’s employees –– want, above all, to know that what they’re buying into is authentic
- It doesn’t matter that people are going to judge your advertising; what matters is how they’re going to judge you for doing it. You can’t afford to care about what people think of your advertising in a creative sense, short of it being offensive or damaging to your credibility. You should care only about what your advertising makes them think of your company for doing it and, ultimately, whether it makes them want to want what you’ve got to sell.
- ING Direct got a lot of things right: its mission, its leadership, its brand, its culture and team, and so on.
- The first order of business was learning “What does the customer really want to pay for?” and “What do we absolutely need in order to profitably deliver it to them?”
- Kuhlmann and his team focused ING Direct on the point where the bank and the customer meet and built its solution outward from that moment of truth. For ING Direct, that felt like something more familiar and comfortable to the average American: a retailer.
- Profits can only come if you get everything right. Your sales and marketing are on trial every day. Bottlenecks are deadly. Trust and reputation are being built constantly, and word of mouth is a big factor in success. A great retail business is built and operated from the customer’s point of view.”
- “As a new bank that wanted to use this strategy, we could develop business practices that supported our vision of a bank with a cause, because we had no legacy to serve.”
- For a company with a cause, change is not a defensive tactic; it’s a way forward. ~
- In the end, the result is glory, and the human spirit triumphs by having done something good and just for man and country. If people’s personal goals get met in the process, that’s fine. It just can’t be the focus.”
- If you make things hard for people, nobody is going to believe for a second that you’re here to save them
- Simplification, as obvious as it might seem in hindsight, has been one of ING Direct’s most fundamental ways of saving the saver. The products themselves must be simple. The process of signing up for one must be simple. The experience of using it must be simple. And this drive is not motivated by the belief that people aren’t smart enough to handle complexity. It’s motivated by the understanding that simple means honest. ~
- declaring the people who work there to be the brand incarnate, and a full-fledged community, one with its own language and customs, its own obligations of citizenship, and its own gathering places. It’s called being “orange,” and the experience of citizenship in the community begins the day they walk through the door:
- The word “values” comes up a lot in the ING Direct story. Values are the structural components of ING Direct’s sense of purpose, its “pixie dust.” This company’s ability to inspire consumers and be nearly immune to being copied by competitors comes not from a proprietary business model, but from the cause the model serves. So it’s natural that the team ING Direct builds has to be made up of recruits with an affinity for those values. And it’s essential that the company appear to be guided by those values in the way it sells
- “The Code states how things should work in our business, by stating how we should be. We did not turn it into a rules-based formula.
- the traditional wall between marketing and operations was torn down.
- The wall between the consumer and the organization got torn down too.
- The organization stands for something; hires and operates in that image; efficiently attracts customers who share those values, who then have their attraction to the brand authenticated by their experiences with it.
- this virtuous circle
- A funny thing happens when an organization is completely sure of what it stands for. It suddenly finds itself more nimble. Instead of a massive strategic playbook-in-the-sky that anticipates every challenge to its goals and prescribes a process for getting from A to B, it simply has a center of gravity and a sense of direction, a certainty about its purpose that is so solid that it isn’t afraid that circumstances might intrude and contaminate its plan.
- The clearer your purpose, the less fixed your plan needs to be. Or, at least, a plan serves the organization’s purpose rather than the other way around.
- A clear sense of purpose is strategically liberating. Serendipity has always been a theme in ING Direct’s success. But serendipity has never meant mere luck or opportunism; the company has always known who and what is needed and where it was ultimately going. ~
- The enemies of organizational integrity for an enterprise come in two basic varieties: The first is more of a nuisance than a threat, though it can still be pretty destructive, and that’s the disparate individual agendas of the people on the team. If a company is more managed than led, the fact that everyone has his or her own agenda is just part of the deal.
- But in a company whose leadership is striving to unite it around some kind of mission, those moments when employees ask about why they
- They’re the professional managers, people with resumes studded with the names of corporate icons, and maybe even some management-consulting experience. They talk about process and measurement and they toss data around like a circus knife-thrower. They think life is lived in fiscal quarters and that every business plan is a chance to start over again. To them, an enterprise is a machine, not a community.
- Their horizons are always short-term,
  and their rhetorical style is characterized by rationality and coolly embroidered with numbers. They are irresistible because, for a while anyway, they can fatten everybody’s bonus check –– and because they seem so darned reasonable.
- Children are the future.
- Financial literacy.
- Housing for those who can’t make that all-important start on their own. F
- First, it collectivized the brand, made it everyone’s business and responsibility. And second, it connected leadership to the operation of the company on a spiritual level.
- We are new here
- Our mission is to help people take care of the wealth they make.
- We will be fair
- We will constantly learn.
- We will change and adapt and dwell only in the present and in the future
- We will listen; we will invent; we will simplify
- We will never stop asking why or why not.
- We will create wealth for ourselves, too, but we will do this by creating value.
- We will tell the truth.
- We will be for everyone.
- We aren’t conquerors –– we are pioneers; we are not here to destroy –– we are here to create.
- We will never be finished

24 Apr 07

Welcome to Academy at the Lakes

good example of mission statement for GSL

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mission

31 Dec 06

All Kinds of Minds > Start

help lay foundation to success in life

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mission

All Kinds of Minds

How can we create forward-looking children and adolescents?

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mission

30 Dec 06

AP Wire | 12/27/2006 | Teens, young adults need money skills

"For some parents, it's more difficult to talk to their kids about money than about sex," Silver said. At the same time, "I hope to give teens some other-side-of-the-table information on where their parents are coming from."

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mission

Life 101: Teacher earns raves for course on the very basics

would be good for advisory program. Not sure what advisory covers now. Would be great legacy for GSL

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mission

17 Nov 06

ASCD

whole child lingo -- look at this in relation to GSL mission statement.

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mission

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Jamie Baker's Library tagged mission → View Popular

The Downsides of Branding - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org

How the Army Prepared Me to Work at Google - Frontline Leadership - HarvardBusiness.org

Purpose Bigger Than Product - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

Your Employees Have No Clue What Your Company Does - Anthony Tjan - HarvardBusiness.org

3111

Welcome to Academy at the Lakes

All Kinds of Minds > Start

All Kinds of Minds

AP Wire | 12/27/2006 | Teens, young adults need money skills

Life 101: Teacher earns raves for course on the very basics

ASCD

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Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Top Contributors

Groups interested in mission

Free Online Web Gaming

writing

Mission Style chairs

Mars

NATO Afghanistan Mission