While reading Faisal Hoque’s article “How to Create a Culture of Innovation” I fixated on a reference made to mission: “An understanding of and commitment to the organization’s mission will guide employees when confronted by the unexpected for which no rules exist.” This statement is both bold and instructive. Bold because it defies the prevalent cynicism surrounding company mission statements. Instructive because it reminds me that an effective mission statement must address not just the value a company seeks to produce but also the way in which it seeks to produce that value. Summarizing the way a company produces value in the form of a mission statement is a very useful way to understand, commit to and ubiquitously communicate company culture. In its heyday, HP’s culture was known simply as “The HP Way” and everyone in HP knew exactly what that meant. The heyday was sustained for a good long run because it helped guide employees when confronted by unexpected circumstances for which no rules existed. Faisal’s article mentions Lou Gerstner’s realization that “…culture isn’t just one aspect of the game–it is the game.” This wisdom helps explain Gerstner’s success reinventing IBM as a thriving services company as its “legacy mainframe” business was maturing and making room for new technologies in the portfolio.

Increasingly, startups are promoting cultural missions publicly, not just to help their employees align with their vision, mission and strategy, but to appeal to customers and partners that might value the approach taken. This is clearly an important step toward more holistic business management. Here are a few examples from my recent browsing of various companies:

Looker (Business Intelligence)

We’re an inventive software company from Santa Cruz, California building new data experiences. Looker is run by a lean team of high-tech upstarts. Pioneering a new kind of business intelligence (BI) that gives anyone the ability to interact with live data, Looker is creating true discovery-driven businesses and unlocking the value of their data, one customer at a time.

For me, the key words that attract customers and help all employees honor the culture are: inventive, lean, high-tech upstarts, pioneering, anyone, Santa Cruz (this mission is overlaid on a photo of the team enjoying an evening barbecue on the beach).

PosIQ (Restaurant CRM & Big Data)

PosIQ is the ultimate combination of seriously experienced software and restaurant people, in one amazing, vibrant (and sometimes chaotic) office in downtown San Jose, California. We’re not just restaurant people trying their hand at software, or “dot-com” guys that think they know how to run a restaurant. We are both. This combination makes us passionate and driven to help every restaurant we work with succeed and flourish, and to change how the entire industry does business.

This paragraph is from PosIQ’s “Company” page…another example of defining the company in terms of the team, their backgrounds, their mission and their methods.

Google (Search et al)

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.

Each of these ten philosophic principles has at least one paragraph describing its meaning, and here you will find the details that help guide the Google culture. Given Google’s size and diversity, the depth is well worth the deviation from brevity. It’s hard to argue that “The Google Way” is the “The HP Way” of the current era.

I could have supplied several examples of publicly promoted mission statements that lack cultural references – these are much easier to find and in my opinion reflect a less confident and less holistic method of describing one’s company. The comfort zone for these companies tends to be centered on product features, which we all know is not a best practice in marketing. In between lie the many companies that are able to link their offering to the market need and some vision for their customers, which is better but still misses the opportunity to leverage the public persona to display – and thus commit to and guide employees to – a specific company culture.