Mission statements:

1. Should be a touchstone against which you can place any decision you're trying to make for the business.

2. Should be short. A short paragraph at most. Bullet points if you must. Short. Pithy. It isn't a white paper, it's a mission statement.

3. Should be capable of being abbreviated into an even shorter form (a trio of words for a motto, for example).

4. Should be grammatically correct and consistent, with proper use of parallel construction (which will assist in the previous point)

5. Should be readable without giggling or eyerolling, either because of pretentiousness or demonstrable falsehood.

6. Should actually inspire people to pursue the mission.

7. Should not read like they were created out of a brainstorming mission by a room full of top execs, the various words and concepts then all shoe-horned into one incoherent, clumsy, overreaching mess.

8. Should be usable, something that people will be willing, proud, or even enthusiastic about putting in business proposals, on posters, in screen savers, etc.

Needless to say, most mission statements violate many, if not most, if not all of the above. Mission statements were a really hot Managerial Thing a decade or two back, part of the drive toward Quality. Like Sturgeon's Law would indicate, 90% of them are crap.

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Yes the mission statements that the contractors at the Flats were very funny.

I loved the whole "Team Work" lets-do-a-department/function-mission-statement training meetings. I would become very annoyed by the whole thing and start pitching the equivalent of “What color is the Red Wagon” mission statements.

The best time was one of them got picked by our “Team Building Facilitator”. It was almost as bad as the current Microshaft one. Laughed every time I heard it.

On a related note, there's the tyranny of the tagline.