Creating a Sense of Mission
10
Long Range Planning, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 10 to 20, 1991 Printed in Great Britain
0024-6301/91 $3.00 + .OO Pergamon Press plc
Creating
Andrew Campbell
a Sense of Mission and Sally Yeung
Mission is still a relatively neglected area of management, and there is no clear agreement on what it encompasses. The Ashridge Strategic Management Centre conducted a 2-year research project designed to fill this gap. The research found that if mission is more clearly defined it can be managed better, and developed a model of mission that includes four elements -purpose, strategy, behaviour standards and values. The project identified companies where, in addition to strong links between these elements, employees also showedan emotional commitment to their company which Campbell has called a Sense of mission’. This commitment was deepest when there was a match between the employee’s values and the company% values.
others see it as the bedrock of a company’s strength, identity and success-its personality and character. Despite the diversity of opinion about mission, it is possible to distinguish two schools of thought. Broadly speaking, one approach describes mission in terms of business strategy, while the other expresses mission in terms of philosophy and ethics. The strategy school of thought views mission primarily as a strategic tool, an intellectual discipline which defines the business’s commercial rationale and target market. Mission is something that is linked to strategy but at a higher level. In this context, it is perceived as the first step in strategic management. It exists to answer two fundamental questions: ‘what is our business and what should it be?‘. The strategy school of mission owes its birth to an article, ‘Marketing Myopia’, which appeared in the Harvard Businesr Review in 1960.’ The author, Ted Levitt, a Harvard marketing professor, argued that many companies have the wrong business definition. Most particularly, companies define their
Long Range Planning, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 10 to 20, 1991 Printed in Great Britain
0024-6301/91 $3.00 + .OO Pergamon Press plc
Creating
Andrew Campbell
a Sense of Mission and Sally Yeung
Mission is still a relatively neglected area of management, and there is no clear agreement on what it encompasses. The Ashridge Strategic Management Centre conducted a 2-year research project designed to fill this gap. The research found that if mission is more clearly defined it can be managed better, and developed a model of mission that includes four elements -purpose, strategy, behaviour standards and values. The project identified companies where, in addition to strong links between these elements, employees also showedan emotional commitment to their company which Campbell has called a Sense of mission’. This commitment was deepest when there was a match between the employee’s values and the company% values.
others see it as the bedrock of a company’s strength, identity and success-its personality and character. Despite the diversity of opinion about mission, it is possible to distinguish two schools of thought. Broadly speaking, one approach describes mission in terms of business strategy, while the other expresses mission in terms of philosophy and ethics. The strategy school of thought views mission primarily as a strategic tool, an intellectual discipline which defines the business’s commercial rationale and target market. Mission is something that is linked to strategy but at a higher level. In this context, it is perceived as the first step in strategic management. It exists to answer two fundamental questions: ‘what is our business and what should it be?‘. The strategy school of mission owes its birth to an article, ‘Marketing Myopia’, which appeared in the Harvard Businesr Review in 1960.’ The author, Ted Levitt, a Harvard marketing professor, argued that many companies have the wrong business definition. Most particularly, companies define their
References: Harper & Row, New York (1973). Levitt, Marketing pp. 45-56, July/August myopia, (1960). Reading Andrew Campbell and Kiran Tawadey, Mission and Business Philosophy: Winning Employee Commitment, Heinemann, Oxford (1990)