The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (2nd Edition)

Author:Sirota, David & Klein, Douglas [Sirota, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

3. Other than communicating the statement to everyone, the company lacks an effective method for translating it into a daily reality that endures over time.

What is decidedly not an issue is semantics. The meetings in which these statements are formulated are often filled with endless debates about the meanings of terms such as “vision,” “mission,” and “purpose,” and whether all or just some of these should be incorporated into the company’s statement. Who cares? Any one of a variety of combinations of these categories can be used to good effect. Our preference is to limit the statement to two categories: purpose (what the organization tries to accomplish) and principles (the values that guide it). Probably the most time-consuming and unnecessary semantic debate concerns the difference between “vision” and “mission.” Despite having sat through innumerable lectures and discussions on the topic, we still don’t understand the difference.

Let’s look in greater detail at each of the real reasons that “mission” (or whatever) statements often have little effect.

1. Lack of Senior Management Commitment

For “doing good” to be more than just subject matter for a retreat, two things are required on the part of top management: one a matter of business judgment and the other emotional:

• Business judgment. In line with what we said earlier about the difference between a short- and a long-term orientation, it should not be surprising that the businesses that do best translating purposes and principles into practice are those where senior management has a long-term perspective. Those are the companies which, in the normal course of doing their business, will take into account the impact of their decisions on all of their key constituencies. They don’t easily scrap what they decided on in a retreat because of short-term pressures and temptations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.