Scrap mission statements: start thinking about your purpose.

This post was original published on my Underdog Effect blog. We’re still undecided if that one will continue now that Rizen’s has been given life. More to come on that. In the meantime, enjoy…

Mission statements have become wrought with baggage. They don’t mean anything. They’re too often too verbose. They don’t pin you down. So let’s toss them out…

Instead, try defining your brand’s purpose. Answer this simple question: why do you exist?

Or think about it another way: what would the world be missing if you didn’t exist?

Most mission statements (contrary to their original intent) have become victims to worthless buzz words like “increasing shareholder value” or “stakeholders” or “quality, service and value.”

Your purpose won’t let you off the hook that easy.

Recently, after working with a client to define their brand purpose, I was, as always, nervous as hell about how we (the rizen team) settled on articulating it. As we presented the sentence — our working version of the company’s purpose — to the  founder/CEO, for a moment it seemed I was right to be nervous. He just stared at it. Then he turned to me and said that I was missing a  word that described a key product difference. He was right. It wasn’t there. We intentionally left it out. I explained that a purpose is bigger than a product difference. It is all about the deeper value you provide to customers and society. The stuff that made you decide to be an entrepreneur.

He got silent.

We all got silent. We sat. Stared. Thought.

After about a minute (which, it turns out, is an excruciating long period of silence in a conference room), he spoke. “Yeah. Yeah. I f***in’ love this. At first I hated it. But I love it. It really says it.”

It was a sentiment he continued to express throughout the meeting, even after we’d moved on to other discussions.

Over time, I’m sure the sentence will be changed. Improved. That’s OK. It was never about the sentence. It was about developing a core understanding of your brand’s purpose. Articulating it. Then…and this is the most important part…acting on it.