"Mission or Mantra?"

Mission or Mantra?
You should have a mission statement for your company. At least that's what we are told by the experts. The mission statement will rally the troops, focus you and your subordinates on the highest purposes of the organization.

To create one, you should call a weekend-long retreat to a wooded area where you will do "trust falls", hold hands, sing, and wordsmith out exactly the language that fully encompasses your divine mission in the marketplace.

Upon returning to work, your staff will sing the mission statement to the tune of Stairway to Heaven and you will no longer need to remind them what to do. Right?

In response to the slow down in the economy, a number of web sites allow you to save a lot of time by automatically generating your mission statement for you.

Try this one from "Joe".  or try a real serious one

Here's the Maze Fun Park's Mission Statement from "Joe":

We continually disseminate installed base expertise and conveniently actualize alternative paradigms to delight the customer.

The new Mission Statement is a Mantra.
Unfortunately, the weekend retreat and the online automatic shortcuts generate about the same material at about the same level of quality. The biggest problem is the NOBODY CAN REMEMBER IT!

After all that work, you can't possibly expect people to remember a muckity-muck mission statement, let alone apply it to their work lives.

Enter the Mantra. Guy Kawasaki, one of the original marketing people at Apple Computer, now a venture capitalist, says, "Your purpose as a company should be able to be summarized in five words, but three is better." (From his book, Reality Check.)

Wikipedia lists a mantra as: A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of "creating transformation" (cf. spiritual transformation).

Read that again: "A group of words capable of creating transformation."

Our mantras.
I like this shift from mission statement to mantra. In our business we have two sides: the public entertainment side in the Maize Quest Fun Park and the business-to-business side with MazeCatalog.com. Instead of two big mission statements, we have adopted two mantras.

Maze Fun Park: Make people happy.
MazeCatalog: Design profitable attractions [for our clients.]

That's it. If you know that, you know for what we stand. Every action we take, every action our employees, contractors, and partners take must be filtered through those two phrases.

Try the filter. Try thinking of an action a Maize Quest employee should take, or should not take. Run it through the filter of "Make people happy." Even a teenager could figure out if they should, or should not.

What value does your business add to the world? You have five words or less.

Have a great week. - Hugh

PS Brainstorm a good mantra for your business? I'd love to hear it. Email it to me and I'll include it in the upcoming launch of the Maze Master Blog on Monday.