The dreaded mission statement. It seems as if every company has one and yet nobody knows what it is or what it really means. Usually created in a corporate vacuum at an annual company retreat, mission statements are the philosophical smokescreen most companies place in front of employees and customers.

Got a company mission statement? Of course you do! If you walked through the office and asked most employees to recite two words of it, would they be able to? Of course not! Why should they be able to, it's meaningless to them.

I actually worked with a CEO who would stop employees impromptu in the hall and ask them to recite the mission. If they did it successfully, he would give them $20. This became old after a while. Some took time to memorize the mission, but most didn't even bother. Those who did take the time to memorize it still found it meaningless. Mission accomplished? I think not. I memorized some of the Periodic Table of Elements to make it through high school chemistry class, but lord knows, i can barely even spell chemistry.

Mission statements are often meaningless because they are not operationalized. Therefore very few, if any, employees actually know how to do the mission. Nice to know what it is. Much better to be able to do it.

Coming up with the mission statement is simple. There is a book by Jeffrey Abrahams called The Mission Statement Book: 301 Corporate Mission Statements from America's Top Companies. This book will cover all you need to know about mission statements. It has 400-plus pages of examples and insights. Reading it and drafting your company's mission statement will be easy. Getting your employees to buy into it and actually do it will be quite challenging.