DR. MICHAEL GERHARZ
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Posts in Tag: Mission Statement

Lazy strategy

Some companies define their strategy as a focus on an outcome, such as “double our revenue in the next 5 years”.

This can be utterly frustrating. Because usually you cannot control it. It’s not something anyone inside the company can do.

When the CEO promotes a vision like this as the company’s focus for the next five years, what does it mean for the team? How do they put it into action? It will often leave large parts of the workforce frustrated.

Ultimately, it’s what I like to call a “lazy strategy” which leaves the hard decisions fuzzy and vague. It’s unclear how to act on it and what to do to make it happen. (Plus: it carries no meaning for most employees.)

A more helpful focus is one that informs actions and empowers decision making within the team. It requires courage and commitment. But that’s what leads to action.

How Spotify chooses the price it’s willing to pay for success

Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, had this to say during a company wide town hall about the Joe Rogan controversy:

“If we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he says. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.”

The crucial word in this statement is “if”. It’s a choice. In many ways. You choose your goals (what Ek calls “ambition”), and you choose the conditions which you are not going to sacrifice to reach the goal (in other words: the price you’re willing to pay to reach the goal).

For Spotify, the ambition Ek is speaking of is named later in the meeting (emphasis mine):

“So I think ultimately, this really comes down to two things. First, do we believe in our mission: 50 million creators and 1 billion users? And finally, are we willing to consistently enforce our policies on even the loudest and most popular voices on the platform? And I’m telling you, I believe both.”

Their mission is “50 million creators and 1 billion users”. That’s the goal they’re trying to reach. That’s the ambition that motivates the company. Together with the first quote, it’s clear that the policies are a servant to this mission. They are designed so that they get out of the way of reaching the mission as much as possible. For example, the policies ensure legality, not pride.

That is a valid stance and Spotify is free to choose that stance.

But the takeaway here is that it is a choice. Spotify can choose to have different policies, e.g. policies that ensure that they would be proud of any content that’s on Spotify.

Spotify can also choose to have a different mission, e.g. related to the quality of the content, the kind of content, the kind of relationship they have with their customer, or a vast number of completely different takes.

They choose to make their ambition purely about numbers. As a price to achieve this mission, they choose to accept to be associated with content that many will “not be proud to be associated with”.

This is where we go

How many of your team members are able to say in a few simple words why they do what they do?

While most companies have a mission statement, few companies are actually on that mission – simply because most team members can’t even repeat that mission without reading it from the posters.

Most mission statements are made to sound good, to cover all grounds, or to contain something for everyone. But by being vague, abstract and everything to everyone, they turn out to be easily forgotten and not at all useful for actually making decisions.

What’s much more useful – and thus, much more powerful – is a navigation system. One that makes everyday decisions easier. One that makes everyone pull into the direction.

The other day, I saw a clever slogan that just did this. It said “Quick logistics”. It’s short. It doesn’t sound fancy. Some might even argue, it’s boring.

But it does one thing that all those elaborate 10 bullet point, fancy sounding mission statements don’t achieve. It provides focus and direction, and it makes everyday decisions easy. Whenever a team member is faced with a decision, she can simply ask: Does this help to make delivery quicker? If yes, do it. If not, don’t.

So, where are you headed?

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