How to Compare a Mission Statement to Business Strategies
A mission statement expresses the greater purpose of a business, the unifying principle connecting its disparate activities. It is an expression of a vision which transcends any of the company's particular activities. A mission statement is intangible and it concerns itself with values and principles, rather than quantifiable goals. Business strategies are collections of concrete steps directed towards specific ends, such as increasing sales by a targeted amount. The sum total of a company's strategies should act in concert to support its mission statement.
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Instructions
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Evaluate business strategies to determine whether they act in service of the ideal's expressed in the company's mission statement. Compare the outcome of successful implementation of a strategy with your vision of what it would look like for the company's activities to be harmonious with its mission. For example, if the mission statement says that the company is dedicated to promoting sustainable living, then a strategy that doubles the number of compost bins sold by local stores is successful in reference to this mission.
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Read a company's strategies with an eye not only towards whether their concrete objectives are consistent with the overall mission statement, but also whether the process of achieving these ends squares with the company's larger vision. For example, consider a company's whose mission is to improve well being and quality of life, and its strategies are aimed at licensing a medication that improves the health of customers and bringing it to market by a certain deadline. If the scramble to meet that deadline results in a cost to the health and well being of employees who are scrambling to meet this goal, then the strategy does not effectively embody the company's mission.
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Examine the company's disparate strategies to determine whether they function in concert in support of the overall mission. Consider a company with a mission to improve the environment. They produce a fuel efficient car but, in an effort to implement money saving strategies, they do not recycle their waste materials. The production of the car may achieve its strategic objective of increasing vehicle fuel mileage and the waste disposal methods may achieve the strategic objective of producing the car in a cost effective manner, but the two strategies work against each other rather than in harmony to further the company's mission.
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