The Art of Comparison 2: Mission
Mission is the central element to any strategic position. The goals of mission are the driving force of any individual, group, or organization. The purpose of every mission is always the goal of a more meaningful life, but we will die for the deepest missions, hoping our sacrifice creates better lives for others.
How do we compare our choices of missions to find the best goals?
We must understand the strategic value of our goals. They serve two purposes. First, they provide a guiding light. They give us a direction and enable us to get back on track when we inevitably make missteps. Secondly, they create strength. Strength comes from uniting with others. How is that done? By creating shared goals. Our personal missions must combine with those of others.
The Honesty of a Mission
The first way missions are compared is by how honest they are. Our goals don’t have to be realistic or practical, but they are always honest. Without honesty, there is no trust. Without trust, there is no courage. Without courage, there is no action. Without action, there is no progress.
Honest missions are the key to sharing goals. Without trusting our goals, people cannot trust us. They must suspect our motives. They may use us for our skills, but they will never partner with us in any venture or campaign. Consider a marriage. Would you marry a spouse you could not trust?
Without this level of unity, there is no true strength, certainly not the kind that can overcome the inevitable adversities of life. Those using us rather than joining us in a shared mission will drop us as soon as the relationship is inconvenient. When we act with the trust of others, we cannot know the future result of any action, but if our mission is true, we can act in courage and trust regardless of what might happen.
Honesty is also how we compare people’s character. Dishonesty always reveals itself. If not right away, certainly over time. Despite what we see in movies and other fiction, the road to success is never paved with lies and deception. People can build pretty high on fraud, for example, Bernie Madoff, but a foundation of lies crumbles over time. If we follow an honest mission, we can make mistakes in our progress, but our progress never tumbles down.
Unclear Missions
We also compare missions by how clear they are. Many of us never spend the time to clarify our goals. We can know we want more and better, more money and respect, better relationships and better skills, but we never ponder what those terms mean. If our missions are to be the guiding star for the adventures of our lives, we must see its goals clearly in our heavens. The better we are able to articulate our goals, both to ourselves and others, the more useful our mission becomes.
Missions can be foolish and short-sighted, but they can still be useful. Let me give you an example from my own life. After my father died when I was thirteen, my family was struggling. My mother worked to support four children. We had no other family to help us. At the time, I promised my mother that she would never end in poverty because I would be a millionaire before I was forty.
This is a poor mission by many standards, but it was clear. Since I promised it to my mother, I could never forget it. Because we couldn’t afford it, I couldn’t attend college. However, by the time I was twenty, I made little progress. Then I started studying Sun Tzu and saw how it applies to sales. After that, I made steadier progress, but I would never become a millionaire climbing the corporate ladder. I needed my own company. Then personal computers came along.
Because of my mission, I moved to personal computer retail. It paid much less than my corporate job, but my mission demanded it. With others, I started a consulting company for the new small computers. Our company became a software development company, then a software company, then an Inc. 500 company. Along the way I found better missions, more shareable ones, and I reached my teenage goal of financial success. And, in that success, I found out something about missions that was both funny and important to know. When I told my mother about honoring my teenage pledge to become a millionaire, she nether remembered my promise nor cared. She was not longer worried about poverty and was just happy I found success.
Shareable Priorities
An important aspect of a clear mission is to have priorities we can share with others. None of us only has one mission; we all have many different ones: in our business lives, in our personal lives, in our social lives, and even in our spiritual lives. None of these missions should be contradictory, but to make them clear, we must understand our priorities in a way that we can share with others.
We compare our priorities just as we compare everything else in life. We must know what comes first, second, and third. Our immediate priorities can change temporarily based upon the obstacles and opportunities that arise, but the priorities we share with other should endure. In the first, less successful part of my career, I put too little priority on an invaluable character value. Because of this, I was always less successful that I could have been.
Broad and Deep Missions
Missions can also be compared on how broad and narrow, deep and shallow they are. Broad missions are more easily shared than narrow ones. My “making a million by the time I was forty” was a narrow mission, but “creating value for our employees and customers” was a broad one. Everyone joining me saw the opportunity for wealth in small computers but, over time, we found that creating value for our customers was critical to our success.
While broad missions are often shallow, narrow ones are often deeper and more compelling. To develop a deeper mission, our business narrowed its focus over time. It focused specifically on helping corporations adapt to change through customizable order processing. This was a mission that united not only our sales team and application developers, but with our customers and them with their customers.
Some missions, however, are both broad and deep. Putting a priority on honesty is one of them. Sun Tzu teaches that honesty is one of the five, key traits of a leader. Since I wanted to be a better leader, I became more serious about always telling the truth or, at least, not lying. As I did so, I gained more confidence in myself and more trust from others. Great people trusted me enough to join us in our company.
A Summary
Missions are compared on:
their honesty,
their clarity,
their priorities, and
our knowing the value of both broad and deep missions.
This raises and interesting point: Are there some things that should not be compared? There is one key one, which we will discuss next week.