The Needless Bullshit of Having a 'Mission'

When I got to a position where I started leading teams something I quickly realized is that I can't generalize about people. Everyone is different. We're all motivated by different things, and you have to account for that as a manager. Some people are motivated by lofty goals and values statements that companies write. Linking their work to a value statement the company has written definitely works. Other people just laugh if you try it.

The lesson is that universal statements like this are wrong. The mission just doesn't motivate everyone.

That said, I'm fairly sure the Asana one is trolling.

"A computer on every desk, running Microsoft software" - early Microsoft mission statement. Mission accomplished.

A good one from the 19th century: "We will build good ships. At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must. But always good ships." - Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. That's on a big plaque at the front gate. It was removed for some years when Tenneco, an auto parts conglomerate, owned the place. It's back now.

My reading of the text is as a foreigner's critique of the American trope of asserting an ideal purpose to everything.

An example from my own experience: an org leader proclaiming the need for "laser sharp focus". Amigo, you're running an organizational metrics p-value hacking campaign, which is by definition not a "focused" play. Could have said something useful like "let's be effective about our experimentation", but no, you must go through the motions of blabbering as if you're an action movie hero.

> The whole concept is pretty stupid, rooted in a silly assumption; that a grand, noble mission is essential to motivate employees.

I am motivated by an important mission, in fact, but I am more motivated by having ongoing impact on that mission (making a difference). I work in defence, so you'd think there's a lot of opportunity to keep people safe, help leaders make better decisions, etc. So far from my perspective, these companies are not very motivated or successful at solving the missions they boldly claim. As a result, I am motivated to leave these places, that lie or are incompetent at solving these missions.

For example, a defence company says they want to "serve our democracies", but they hardly have any users. Another defence company has been building product for 4 years, yet has 0 users over that time. Then there are other, defence companies with unicorn valuation with also very cool marketing, but very little impact in ongoing crisis. All the mentioned companies have very good publicity, it's not until you work for them you realise they have 0 impact. There is no reason to change their ways, because they can continue to sign more contracts with gov (tens of millions, hundreds of millions).

All you see publicly is cool tens/hundreds of million investment or contracts, cool movie like drone shots, "AI", cool drones, explosions, jets and good music. You don't get to see the 0 impact. Or worryingly, negative impact when these things don't work.

I've been working in defence-tech startups for more than 2 years.

Do you think there might be more functions to a mission other than to motivate employees with some grand narrative? Perhaps it could serve as a basis for alignment, potentially helping to write strategies, set goals and sometimes even take day-to-day decisions on all levels? I have certainly seen mission statements that are useful in this sense, not just on a company level, but on a level of platforms and individual teams. Personally, I find it much easier to work towards explicitly stated common goals.

A clear mission statement can help to guide decision-making and keep the company focused on its goals. It can provide a framework for evaluating new initiatives and ensuring that they are aligned with the company's overall vision. Also a compelling mission statement can attract top talent who are aligned with the company's values and goals. This can be a significant advantage for startups competing for a limited pool of skilled workers.

This was clearly true for Google with its mission. There are so many other successful examples.

Looks like author is burned by bad startups with inauthentic mission statements.

"Our mission is to make cool stuff, learn some shit, and make money in the process" would apply everywhere. But business has the veneer of being super serious and you can't say things like that. It's an oddity of how society just has some taboos and acceptable behavior from companies.

It's also why the inverse (leadership at a company being straightforward) is seen as rare.

Mission statements are important for real companies, not so-called "tech" companies. He cites Patagonia, Honest Tea and IKEA as examples of real companies. None of them engage in data collection, surveillance and advertising services via positioning themselves as intermediaries (middlemen) and then call this a "business model". None of them are just giant websites that derive their profit from other peoples' work, so-called "user-generated content". As one might expect, the mission statements of real companies are not bullshit.

Companies need a mission statement telling why the company needs to exist. Unfortunately, as highlighted by the author, too often these mission statements are bullshit, which is making them pretty useless, even counterproductive.

Business and Management practices rarely evolve to optimise anything other than the rate of output. Vision/Mission/Values can potentially improve the sanity of those involved and at least it stands as a shared ambition and social contract to possibly give employees and public a valid route for criticism (other than share price). I'll celebrate and encourage practical optimisations for people over money alone.

A Berlin startup that dealt in being an Uber for house cleaners, even forced the poor souls to write what was their “mission in cleaning” - true story.

> I don’t know why startups have the urge to write statements like this, to connect themselves to a noble goal.

They sell it to inveators for to get some free money. That's it, no magic.

In general, people do seemingly strange things mainly for two cases: power and money (it just gives power). So only one, but that's usually more complex to understand.

I love that someone said this. And so articulately. It has bothered me / mild lol at “missions” of these corporates.

I also think you don’t need to be the Valve one either. Not everyone is going to be number 1. Be an OpenAI or a Valve. Plenty of money to be made as an Ikea or even the even more budget than Ikea furniture company.

This is something I would have agreed on when I was younger, but after being in the drivers seat I can really see that I was missing the forest for the trees. It's very easy to say "all these billion dollar companies are wrong" when you haven't tried herding cats yourself.

I'd prefer something like:

"At company Foo our mission is to create software that people use, love and pay for, and along the way to find fulfillment through challenging work that makes us learn, allows us all to be paid well, lead a happy life and make scads of moolah for our investors."

You can say of Musk what you want, but "Going to Mars" is a big and clear mission statement that can (and does?) inspire the whole of humanity. A former boss of mine always talked about the 'tempting perspective', I like that take.

reading the comments here, it strikes me that somethings written down look like 'missions' i.e. a statement of the reason the company exists, and others describe a 'vision' i.e. a description of a future state. I wonder if one or the other is more important in your opinions, are both required at all?

To be honest as product manager a tool I have to promote my product before I have engineers build the thing, is a strong vivid vision statement. "in the future our customers will be able to do x [for the first time/faster/cheaper/easier/better]"

> What actually drives employees is the inner workings of a company: the degree of autonomy employees have, the quality of products being shipped, and having impressive people as seniors and leaders, who have good product vision.

I think the author was actually being generous by describing employees this way, because there's no mention of pay. Scratch the surface of the mission at a lot of companies, especially startups, and it becomes clear it's a recruiting tactic and no-cost psychological reward. Which is fine if the employer and employee are aligned and the tradeoff understood. But the criticisms of low pay in the "helping professions" could be applied here.

Personally I think most company missions are insincere and I would not accept lower pay to work for a mission-driven company.

terrible take. Just say some of those missions don't speak to you a be done with it. Why immediately say they are bullshit. It reminds me of this terrible book theorising that people have bullshit jobs, among others: - personal assistants, - door greeters, - executive assistants

But in reality just the other day here on hacker news someone was essentially asking for a personal assistant. [1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39137625

"However, I would appreciate if startups just cut the crap about socially concerned goals."

While I like to maintain that there are start-ups with genuine society-improving aspirations (in addition to the goals of surviving and making profit), perhaps we could use a term "mission washing" to accompany Morozov's concept of "solutionism".

Setting aside the nonsense missions, I find it surprisingly useful from a self-determination perspective when working with a strongly motivated team:

- On one hand we say '100Xing investigations'. This is customer centric, focusing on the process they go through.

- Our team & history are deep tech - GPUs, program synthesis & language technology, graph AI, and large-scale visualization. This is not customer centric, but does give us differentiating ingredients for achieving that.

Why this matters is we try to have loose management with declarative assignments. It's one thing for folks to be senior on their craft and know the multiple paths to achieve something... and another for them to know how to make tricky trade-offs that align with the company. The technology investments show where spending a bit of extra time helps under-the-hood, and the customer problem focus is even better for that. Likewise, when someone veers off, it's a lot easier for a peer to gut check. Our early days were too tech-centric in mission, and that led some things astray.

There are other reasons too, such as helping team cultural assignment. Overall, having something good here does simplify a lot. If startups are a team of people navigating their way to a scalable business, getting the mission right is a natural aspect of figuring out what value you are bringing to what customers.

Nicely written.

It’s not against missions; it’s against lies.

“Needless bullshit” is a bad take.

What if I have a mission and I like it and it’s totally authentic? My customers like it too. Are you calling me full of it for achieving that difficult goal?

I think you’re right about a lot of inauthentic mission statements, but I think crass swearing is the real “needless bullshit”.

typical "I don't understand it so it's bullshit" rant. pinning it on "motivation" is very naive and highlight lack of self reflection or understanding on the topic.

the mission has a very real objective, which is align everyone own goals to the overal goals. it's a protection against micromanagement. it enables manager in the org to self check if their goals are aligned to where the company wants to be instead of bubbling up to leadership every single decision

in turn, if the management goals are all aligned, cross development collaboration is much more likely, because both team share similar goals and kpi and will have concrete benefit in collaborating reaching these

in turn each developer has a set target, and doesn't need to bubble up to management every decision. it is enabled to decide autonomously which course of action aligns the daily task with the yearly goal, benefitting indirectly from a clear mission in term of needing less micromanagement.

now that's the optimum and not always the case, typical failure scenario include bad mission, unaligned goals or unrelated kpi, there are more than a few companies where the whole chain breaks here or there, but that doesn't mean the underlying principle is sound: substituting direct guidance with guidelines removes micromanagement and enable roles autonomy.

it's quite common for developer "not seeing it" because they don't really engage in thinking why and what would be the alternative, or because they have been in suboptimal working places, but before calling any universal truth maybe the writer should have done some cursory research on the topic at the very least and merged his anectdotes with the underlying theory to contrast where things went wrong.

beside the bit around valve is also a bit miopyc. even if they don't call it mission, they have a clear vision and they say as much: "Our platform connects players with the world's greatest entertainment. " and the product goals derive from that.

and in the end, the true colors of the poster finally shows:

> cut the crap about socially concerned goals