MISSION STATEMENTS

Nope, this isn’t just for missionaries. You know the kind of comment about how they are going to go out and saved the world whether or not they need it.

A mission statement is too me a statement of an organization’s intended purpose. It can be very poetic, it can be what the management truly feels it is going to want to accomplish. And it can also be a pile of crap.

One might question what the value there really is in a missionary statement? Well, probably not much to the dude working his ass off at the bottom of the labor totem pole. It doesn’t change his thinking or improve his life.

To the guy at the top he can put the statement on something and show it off to his customers if they ask what they do. Sounds good, providing the actually do what the mission statement claims.

Of course in politics mission statements fall under two categories. There are the campaign promises you lie about and the speeches after you get elected where you lie about lying. Yeah, I guess you get the idea I don’t see this as a serious thing with politics.

My basic view is that mission statements are in reality a necessary evil. We really do want to know the purpose to an organization’s existence. But we aren’t curious enough to ask them to prove it.

That is till the screw up! Then boy do we want to know what happen! And you can be darn sure we aren’t going to be happy with any mission statement that in the fine print says, “None of this matters in the case of an OOPS!” They would never put that in a mission statement, but it probably happens all the time.

In any case, I don’t know, but I suppose it is fun to dream. What good is life if all we have to work with is reality and it sucks so bad?

So I say why not lie a little? Let’s have a party and call it work. Then we can all be happy and think things are cool when they are not.

Yep, illusion in any form works for me. I love it. And sometimes we almost get a chance to pretend it is a good thing.

In the meantime, I think I’ll work on a mission statement as Mayor. Hmmm, let me see I wonder if I need to start out by saying I vow to stop being a lying slug of a two faced, double dealing slug?

No, that is probably not good to say. I mean if I say it then it presumes I was those things in the first place and also plan on changing. That would be kind of silly to admit. And there is no fun to mission statements if they can only be true.