I had a bit of a surprise this week when a longstanding client (who will remain anonymous for obvious reasons) informed me that they had just taken part in a brand purpose workshop.
For context, the organisation in question already has a vision statement, a mission statement, and a promise statement. I’m trying to simplify these into something easier to deal with: a single, simple statement of ambition. I’ve written elsewhere about visions, missions, and promises, so I’ll resist the temptation to repeat myself here. The problem in this case is that the vision statement, mission statement, brand promise, and purpose statement are competing answers to the same question:
What does the company hope to achieve?
Personally, I couldn’t care less whether the answer to this question is called a mission, a vision, a purpose or something more prosaic. But it’s a single question and it should have a single (singular) answer.
At the heart of the conflict between purposes, missions, and visions, is the (often unspoken) need to decide how to frame this answer:
Is the answer a financial target?
Should it express the value the organisation hopes to create for its shareholders?
Or its employees?
Or its customers?
Should it be framed in terms of a social benefit?
Or should it express how the organisation hopes to make the world a better place?
There’s a spectrum at work here: a financial target is a narrow, hard goal. Value-creation for employees and customers invokes a broader concept of worth. And an ambition framed in terms of social or environmental progress is broader again in scope and scale.
So, which approach is best?
Brand purpose advocates tend to suggest that a company’s ambition only becomes meaningful once it extends beyond narrow financial motives. Detractors make the opposite case: that purpose statements tend to be so grandiose and divorced from the operational and financial reality of a business that they become inherently meaningless.
Both arguments miss the point: what makes a statement of ambition meaningful is the extent to which the people in an organisation are committed to its achievement. This is true whether that ambition is framed in terms of financial metrics, customer benefits, social impact, or dents in the universe.
If I work for a business that defines success as reaching a billion dollars in revenue by 2030, then I will only take this ambition seriously to the extent that it informs the business’ decisions. If the leaders of the business use the target to make decisions (‘Will doing x help us become a billion-dollar business by 2030?’) then it becomes a meaningful, useful ambition. On the other hand, if the business doesn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of ever becoming a billion-dollar business, the ambition is academic (at best) and the question might as well be ‘Who is John Galt?’
The same rule applies to a purpose-led organisation. If it harbours an ambition to save the world’s oceans and rivers one burger at a time, the people sourcing, cooking, and serving those burgers are going to work out pretty quickly if that ambition has any meaningful impact on their work. When a company’s ambition isn’t hard-wired into its practices, processes and products, the people closest to that company become very cynical very quickly. And the organisation’s leadership develops a (deserved) reputation for spouting all manner of hubristic nonsense, without any concept of reality or accountability.
However you frame your company ambition, if you have no plan for making it happen then it’s really just a pile of the worst kind of trust-destroying bullshit. PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey provides a handy reminder of the extent to which executives are unaware of how little of their bullshit is believed. PwC surveyed 548 business executives, 2,515 customers and 2,039 employees in the United States across various industries. 86% of those executives believe that employee trust is high. The equivalent figure for employees is 67% (an 18-percentage point gap, allowing for rounding error). Even worse, 90% of the executives believe customers highly trust their companies. The equivalent figure for customers is 30%.
Businesses and the people who lead them are suffering from a huge credibility disorder.
The antidote is simple in theory: set a clear ambition and then focus on delivering it.
The problem is that in practice this can be a deeply uncomfortable process. It forces an organisation’s leaders to clarify what matters most to them: is it making money? Is it making customers happy? Is it providing a stable source of employment? The temptation will always be to answer ‘yes’ to all of the above, which is why so many organisations indulge in strategic cakeism: a recipe involving visions, missions and purposes (which you can have and eat too).
But simplicity and single-mindedness are achievable.
One of my favourite examples is an oldie but a goldie. Bill and Vieve Gore founded Gore in 1958. While the company was in its infancy, Bill explained that ‘the objective of the enterprise is to make money and have fun doing so.’ And so the company has adopted a unique lattice structure and a working model that relies on personal commitment, facilitated by senior sponsorship. It’s also refreshing to see a business admit to caring about making money.
Not every company starts out with a clear statement of ambition. Often, such statements evolve in response to a specific point in the company’s evolution. Dropbox’s mission (to design a more enlightened way of working) helped the business grow from a file sharing site into a suite that solves all sorts of productivity challenges: from device backup to task scheduling to document signing. When CEO Drew Houston describes the evolution of the company, this reframing of its mission comes across as fundamental to success. It helped the company recognise that there were plenty of problems ‘hidden in plain sight’ that it could fix for people. He described its impact as ‘seismic’ when it launched in 2019. And the company’s most recent annual report shows that the mission remains a central feature of its business strategy:
In a world where using technology at work can be fragmented and distracting, Dropbox makes it easy to focus on the work that matters. By solving these universal problems, we’ve become invaluable to our users. The popularity of our platform allows us to scale efficiently. We’ve built a thriving global business with 18.22 million paying users.
The business model flows seamlessly from the mission: identify a productivity problem; solve it with technology; allow users to register for free; become invaluable enough that they will migrate to paid subscriptions; and then cross-sell them a wider range of productivity solutions. The mission drives the product; the product attracts users. Users become subscribers. And subscribers drive profits.
If you’re deciding between competing ambition statements, work through the implications of each candidate: what would happen if this was the single most important outcome your company wanted to achieve? How would it affect your business model? What about your culture? What products and services would you sell in future? What implications would it have for your customer experience?
If an ambition statement has no material implications, then it’s not a solid idea. At best, it’s a nice line to use in communication.
If an ambition statement has implications that your company won’t be willing or able to deliver, then it’s not right for your organisation. There’s no point trying to lead where nobody will follow.
You’ll know you’ve got a great ambition statement when it has clear implications for your business and you’re excited enough by them to want to make them happen. (And it’s a good thing to feel a little scared, too.)
Because a great ambition statement is like an electric hare: it makes things run faster and in the same direction.
And there should be only one hare.