Mission Statement Shred-Up, Part 2

So… this blew out a bit from what I’d intended. You’re under no obligation to read this, but I estimate it’ll take 5-6 minutes.

Quick refresher on the two mission statements from yesterday:

1. ‍To inspire and empower our customers to use their money to create a world where people and the planet thrive. (Bank Australia)
2. Empowering our people and the communities in which we work and making sustainable, transparent and balanced business decisions. (CommBank)

First some background:

Commonwealth Bank
In the last few years, CommBank has been caught up in several scandals including money laundering and creating dodgy net-zero policies.

Their net-zero policy included a plan to reduce funding of new oil and gas projects, aiming to get their investment in those projects from roughly $2.5bn per year down to $0 by 2030. However, not only did they continue to fund new projects, but projections showed they planned to continue well past their claimed “end” date, which brought the whole policy into question.

It became the first case ever in Australia where the Aussie Courts made confidential CommBank documents available to shareholders, so their net-zero claims could be investigated.

Oil and gas projects have become synonymous with destroying ancient indigenous sites, as well as current inhabited communities. As a funder and/or lender to oil & gas projects, it’s almost a given that a community or historic site will be heavily impacted.

Bank Australia
One of an number of emerging “ethical” banks, Bank Australia has never funded a fossil fuel project, instead pledging to only ever fund projects that are of benefit to the planet, to people and communities, in clean energy, or for other warm and fuzzy things (read about them all here).

How the filtering thing works

It’s really simple, almost embarrassingly so – take any new idea and ask, if it were to become reality, would it further the mission. Let’s pick one feature from one Bank Australia product.

Under their home loan products you can do what they call an “Eco pause”, where you pause your home loan repayments for up to 3 months to pay for eco-upgrades like installing solar, batteries etc.

If we imagine the Eco pause feature came up during a Monday standup, they could pretty quickly run it through the mission statement filter:

“Well our mission says ‘inspire and empower our customers to use their money to create a world where people and the planet thrive‘, so does it do that?”

Inspire our customers (yep) to use their money (yep) to create a world where people and planet thrive (hard to argue!).

It works for product features like EcoPause; it’d work for the products themselves (eg: green mortgages); and it’d work for Bank Australia deciding which external projects to invest in.

There’s no such thing as a perfect mission statement, but Bank Australia’s does a smashing job of capturing their mission. At a glance, it might look like any fluffy mission statement that any company could just make up. The difference is that it’s actually aligned – from the products to the features to the investments, the mission statement remains true.

Bank Australia will likely attract a certain type of person who’ll also feel aligned with what’s on offer, at least to a degree.

Let’s try CommBank.

They have a lot of products and offerings. From normal bank stuff like mortgages and credit cards, to self-managed super funds, stockbroking and personal investing – if it’s money related, CommBank probably does it.

As far as I can tell, you can invest in any company in the world through CommSec (their stockbroking and investment company). No filtering, no purpose, just the cashola. It’s a one-stop shop, about the biggest there is.

Their mission statement, which very similar to Bank Australia’s in it’s choice of some key trendy words, means very little in the scheme of what they offer. It’s subtle, but did you notice that CommBank’s mission statement is actually mostly about them:

Empowering our people and the communities in which we work (to do what?) and (from here, it’s about CommBank) making sustainable, transparent and balanced business decisions.

They actually never state what they empower their people and communities to do, which I find hilarious. Meaning the remainder of their mission is to basically make decisions.

But the single fact of them investing in damaging projects pretty much obliterates any real meaning you might derive from that mission statement.

Imagine the decision to invest in a new coal mine comes up at the Monday standup, and they put it through the filter:

“Well, our mission says ‘Empowering our people and the communities in which we work and making sustainable, transparent and balanced business decisions’, so does it do that?

Empowering our people and the communities in which we work (to do…?) and making sustainable (no, see damaged indigenous sites above), transparent (ha, no, see court case above) and balanced (???) business decisions.

I imagine after a few quiet seconds someone asks “who wrote this thing anyway?”. Then the slam of a big “APPROVED” stamp.

I admit it’s not a fair comparison. CommBank is a behemoth compared to Bank Australia, has been around for decades longer, and as you might expect from an older corporation, it’s values have become a little diluted over time.

But the big difference for me, is that while CommBank does have a mission statement – that is, it has a sentence that includes trending words that should make bigwigs and shareholders feel good and masks all the bad sh*t going on in the background – Bank Australia actually has a mission.

The statement without the mission behind it is just a bunch of words.

How can you replicate the good bits?

If you have a mission, take a minute to understand what that is. It doesn’t have to be grand, but it does have to be true.

And, gasp, not everyone has a mission.

Plenty of great businesses exist for decades on the back of good service and honest work. Performing your trade properly, with care and diligence, could actually make you remarkable. Understand if that’s where you’re at too and if so, spare yourself the pain of crafting a meaningless mission statement.

Thanks for sticking with me to here. What questions does this bring up for you?