Business literature often describes the factors that guide organisations in three terms: mission, vision, and values. In essence:
- 'Mission' is what the business is there to do, as set out by the original owners or subsequently modified by the management;
- 'Vision' is a rosy picture of what the world will be like once the business has done it; and
- 'Values' are the rules that the corporation, and the people in it, live by. They define what the corporation stands for.
We’ll call these ideas about mission, vision and values strategic memes as they set out what the corporation is there to do. While they definitely mutate over time they are created but the founders and owners of the corporation. What the corporation is there to do is distinct from how it does it.
We will look at what happens when employees don’t share the corporate vision in the good corporate citizen, but for now we will assume that mission, vision and values are common to everyone inside an organisation. But since they differ between organisations, we can be sure that they are carried by memes.
We also have another set of memes, which we will call tactical memes which codify and carry organisation structure, management methods, rules, processes and a thousand other things. These tactical memes are there supposedly to deliver the aims of the organisation. Of course, in most corporate entities, they do nothing of the sort, and we will also take some time to look at meme clashes.
Simple, understandable and estimable visions
In general, good strategic memes are admirable and powerful in that they can be used as a test of any proposed change and a way of ensuring unity and consistency.
If the management of the organisation is running these memes well then they will promote ‘good’ (i.e. consistent) behaviour and act to kill off any out-of-date or non-compliant ideas.
The strategic memes will, if applicable, also act as a set of ethical guidelines: remember Google’s famous (and now seemingly abandoned) "don’t be evil" slogan?
Externally, strategic memes, which are by definition compelling and easy to digest, are a vital tool in communicating what the company is there to do to a number of important audiences - investors, customers, potential employees and potential allies. And because they are simple, understandable and estimable memes, they can overwhelm any competing ways of working and make the vision come true.
True believers need true beliefs
Businesses often create simple and elegant mission statements around which an entire organisation could rally. NASA’s "put a man on the moon by the end of the decade" is famous, as is Wal-Mart’s "give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people". And you can clearly see the principles in Associated Press mission to provide 'distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity, with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed'.
Unfortunately, most mission statements sound as if they had been written by the company’s PR department rather than reflecting the true spirit of the organisation. It can be hard to identify the true values of a corporation, rather than the values they post on their websites and put in their annual reports.
One mechanism is by observing the behaviours that are rewarded by the company. I rather liked the description by Richard Brodie (the author of Microsoft Word) in Virus of the Mind (1996) of Microsoft’s true values as ‘elitism, commitment, intolerance of shoddiness, and hard work’.
Another sign of the reality of a set of values it its persistence: Johnson & Johnson still use the same ‘credo’ that one of their founders wrote in 1943.
We can also cite the example of Thomas Watson Jr, the man who turned IBM into a giant in the 1960s. He described the core values of IBM in his 1963 book 'A Business and Its Beliefs'. His view is that the central beliefs of a corporation are central to its success, because they help people find common cause and sustain a sense of direction through the many changes that take place from one generation to another. Beliefs, he said, come before policies, procedures and goals, and they should be stuck to through good times and bad. Younger readers (i.e. anyone under 50) may not remember that IBM not only dominated the computing industry, it was the computing industry until about 1980. That they entirely missed the later rise of decentralisation of data (we have a case study on this later on) is beside the point, they survived by keeping true to their core values of vigorous competition and great customer service while their competitors were slaughtered by Microsoft, Compaq and an army of clones.
The erosion of corporate vision
Some organisations, such as charitable bodies, have very strong and stable strategic memes. They do not change over decades, usually because the same problems that caused the organisation to be founded continue to haunt the current generation.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for many other large organisations. The founders will have set out clear objectives when they started out (if they didn’t the organisation wouldn’t have known how to be successful), but when the founders of the organisation depart or die, it gradually loses purpose as the managers repeatedly amend the strategic memes. After all, the founder’s replacement is likely to be a professional manager rather than an entrepreneur, and he will be driven by short-term considerations like the stock price rather than grand long term visions.
I strongly believe that 'simply making money' is not sufficient reason for an organisation to exist. Vision memes have to be allowed to mutate to meet market needs, but they should remain simple, understandable and estimable.