Quesiton: What are some interesting mission statements or values statements of some of the companies in your industry? What do their statements reveal?Time Warner Cable's Mission Statment:
Connect people and businesses with information, entertainment and each other. Give customers control in ways that are simple and easy.
Analysis: The mission statement on the Time Warner Cable website seems to be a relatively simple statement of what the company seeks to achieve as a media corporation. Besides the part about giving control to the customers, nothing in the statement could be directly related to a corporate social responsibility, and seems to reveal little about the company outside of its strict business functions. However, this is certainly not due to a lack of strong social responsibility and involvement in the community, something the business is actually quite heavily involved in. Time Warner simple doesn't see it's application of these principles as separate from its corporate function. While millions are given to charity, the most important outreach and involvement projects taken on by the company are the public service announcements and the distribution of free cable and internet to schools. Directly from the website, "Greater still are the tens of millions of dollars more of in-kind contributions we provide through the production and distribution of public service announcements, free cable and high speed broadband connections to schools..." These activities are not separate from the mission statement - it just applies it in a socially responsible way.
Of course, most companies have mission statements, which often sound high and promising, or at best, aren't bad. What separates companies from each other is in how truly they apply their mission statements. Time Warner Cable has excellent examples of how it has applied it's mission statement in ways that reach beyond the strict business interpretation. For example, the "Connect a Million Minds" initiative, which seeks to "introduce kids to afterschool science, technology, engineering, and math". This program recently reached a milestone, with 400,000 kids as part of it.
The initiative follows the mission statement of "connecting people... with information", and is a philanthropic initiative which seeks to contribute something of tremendous importance to the world as a whole.
Opinion: However, an important thing to recognize about mission statements is that they do not usually mandate moral behaivor. News Corp., recently at the center of the "News of the World" scandal in the UK, had the following mission statement:
"Creating and distributing top-quality news, sports and entertainment around the world."
While employees of the paper, which was a subsidiary of News Corp., did violate norms of ethical conduct, not to mention the law, they were technically still following the mission statement of the company. Social responsibility and ethical conduct can rarely be encompassed in something as simple and confined as a mission statement, which is about the goals of an organization and not usually about the methods. Those must be dealt with by a company's code of conduct, a far less general set of rules which deal with the behavior of employees.
In sum, while a mission statement is important, and can be applied to corporate activities beyond official business, it is not a perfect slogan of how a company should and will act. No business can adequately summarize itself in a single sentence.
In sum, while a mission statement is important, and can be applied to corporate activities beyond official business, it is not a perfect slogan of how a company should and will act. No business can adequately summarize itself in a single sentence.
I agree with your conclusion that mission statements cannot summarize a whole business. A mission statement's goal is to make the company look good by describing briefly what they do, which sometimes means they have to cut out descriptions of Corporate Social Responsibility in order to have brevity - a quick google search tells me that McDonalds, which helps the poor with the Ronald McDonald House, doesn't mention their service because, in the end, most people go there to get good food, not to help charities.
ReplyDeleteThus, the interesting thing is that, while CSR is important, it's not vital enough to the company to even warrant it having a spot in their mission statement.
I find it really interesting that a company's ethics code and mission statement can be two totally separate entities--often without overlap. It's truly a sneaky way to come across as a certain type of caring company (through the mission statement) but not necessarily follow through on those promises (in the code of ethics). News Corp was a great example of this...and I think there are probably other companies who consciously separate their ethics and mission statements to avoid being held to higher standards than are actually achievable to still realize their own bottom line.
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