Mission Quiz – Answers

Thanks for playing along with the quiz, sparked some hilarious email conversations this week!

Here are the answers.

• “To ensure everyone has access to clean water and a toilet within our lifetime.” – Who Gives A Crap

• “To deliver 100% renewable energy across North East Victoria and Southern NSW, in a way that supports and empowers communities.” – Indigo Power

• “Pure passion and intense dedication travel fast and deep.” – Ducati

• “To bring people together to inspire and invest in humanity.” – Humanitix

• “To make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world by rewiring the world of small business by making it seamless, simpler, and smarter.” – Xero

• “To be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve.” – Dell

• “Our goal is to create unique products, developing innovative research and production processes as well as using our own technologies.” – this one surprised me: Nutella!

Sitting on my high horse and declaring any of them good or bad doesn’t feel right, even though that’s what I said I’d do.

While I believe mission statements work best when they have a purpose and something tangible to focus on, writing something like this shouldn’t be overly formulaic. There still needs to be evidence that it was written by humans and not robots, and humans have subjectivity when writing them just like I do when I read them.

So instead, I’ve listed them in order from my favourite to least favourite, looking for these features:

1. The strength and clarity of the owner’s purpose
2. Tangible things that a staff member could measure their day-to-day work against, to know if they’re actually contributing to the mission
3. Measurability – Not all missions have this, but is there an obvious metric that shows whether the organisation is achieving it’s mission or not?
4. Filterability – could I imagine this company using their mission statement to make a significant decision?
5. The statement is more or less aligned to what the organisation does without being unrealistically lofty
6. Is it generic – ie: can you put a different company name on the end without really noticing?
7. Did they put all their effort into crafting their big mission statement just to declare they’ll do what any business should do anyway?

Some notes on my ranking:

Ducati’s statement, on the surface anyway, is fluffy. I think this is what “wordsmithing a mission statement” looks like. The word choice is careful, but I think it kinda works. It has personality, and there’s definitely some filtering still possible with it.

Dell was the first one I found and my least favourite through the whole process… until I found the Nutella one. You could literally stick any business name after Nutella’s statement, and it would probably even make more sense than seeing Nutella there.

Who Gives a Crap and Indigo Power work for me because they have a clear intention, with a metric, and I can visualise all their filtering decisions happening there.

Xero, Dell and Nutella (I still can’t believe that’s Nutella!) don’t work for me for lots of reasons, but the main ones are they’re either very generic, or they state the obvious. Yes, Dell has a metric – be the most successful computer company in the world – but what does that mean? Successful how? What’s defines a computer company? If you’re the most successful in the world, why are you limited to only serving certain markets?

Hope you enjoyed finding out who owned these.

If your purpose is as clear as Who Gives a Crap or Indigo Power, you could follow their format and create a very powerful mission statement that would actually be useful to you.

If your mission is less clear, the workshop on November 25th might help figure it out👇