Page 209 - Performance Leadership

198 • Part III Principles from the Values and Social Dimensions

Again, consider Nike’s mission statement. It is short, externally
focused, and broad enough to capture many different ways to serve the
customer. It is specific enough to focus on innovation for athletes, and
it even uses the word inspiration—and inspiring it is. According to
Nike, everyone with a body is an athlete. And the hidden message is
clear, the more Nike products you use, the more of an athlete you will
become. Let’s also look at Southwest Airlines’ mission statement, which
is equally as strong as Nike’s. The mission of Southwest Airlines is to
be dedicated to the highest quality of customer service delivered with
a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit.
This mission statement clearly focuses on service above anything else.
The choice of words is remarkable, as many of the words have an emo-
tional appeal. As management literature and management theory can
be full of jargon, being able to bring a complex set of thoughts to
human proportions, is quite an achievement.

A Stakeholder Analysis of Mission Statements

Organizations are facing multidimensional competition. Not only are
we competing for the best customers, but also for the best talent and
the best partner network. We compete for the best stakeholders and
actively need to work on our relationship with them. I’ve made an
analysis of over a hundred mission statements to see how they reflect
which stakeholders are considered important, and how the company
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adds value to them. My analysis of mission statements across different
industries revealed that most mission statements do a good job of iden-
tifying an organization’s key stakeholders.
Figure 11.2 shows the result of this analysis. Part A shows how often
each group is mentioned in the mission statements. The pie chart in
part B shows the cases where only one stakeholder was mentioned in
the mission statements and which stakeholder that was. Part C shows
in how many cases each group was mentioned first in the mission state-
ments and in how many cases it was mentioned last.
For the purposes of the analysis, it is assumed that if a group is men-
tioned first, it is more central to the success of the business. If a group
is mentioned last, this can mean multiple things. The stakeholder
could be less important than those mentioned first. Another option is