On a mission statement mission

Marketing strategy seems increasingly important, yet Russ Swan finds himself frustrated with contrived mission statements that do little to inform

IF I HAD a pork pie hat and Ray-Bans, I’d be putting them on right now because, just like Jake and Elwood Blues, I’m on a mission. A mission from GAWD.

To be more precise, I’m on a mission to unravel mission statements. You know the sort of thing: “LabCo is a global leader providing cutting-edge innovations with a broad portfolio of high-quality versatile and proven multi-parameter solutions”.

These banal generalisations are now routinely appended to all manner of communications, littering websites, emails, product literature, and data sheets. Whenever I see one, which sadly is several times a day, I want to scream “just tell me what you [expletive deleted] do!”

I have nothing against mission statements as such. It makes perfect sense to explain who you are and what you do, in a succinct and informative way. It’s just that so many of them are neither succinct nor informative, and seem designed to obscure rather than explain the organisation’s purpose.

The problem spans both the commercial side of our industry and the associations and other bodies that support it. I recently had cause to look up some information from EMBO, and being of a curious nature wanted to remind myself exactly what this body was. In the context of the topic I was researching, I guessed the E probably stood for European. But guessing isn’t really good enough, so of course I went looking for the answer.

Guess what I found? “EMBO stands for excellence in the life sciences”. Erm, no it doesn't, because if it did it would be called EITLS. This is from the ‘vision and mission’ page on the official website. The ‘history’ page offers no real clarification, but dangles clues with mentions of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC). You don’t have to be called Sherlock to work out the rest, but an actual definition seems curiously absent from the entire site.

Is this an isolated example? I fear not. The New Year will see the launch of a new association for lab managers in the UK (and not before time), as a spin-off from Gambica. I could guess that the last letter in this acronym probably stood for association – but what of the rest? To its credit, the explanation is to be found online – and revealed not only that my guess was wrong, but that the name doesn’t actually mean anything at all. It once stood for Group of Associations of Manufacturers of British Instrumentation, Control and Automation, but for over a decade now it is just a word.

The problem is, if you’re going to make up a word, why choose one that is both ugly and meaningless? Why not go for something snappy and zingy and inspiring? Or even funny? In the spirit of cooperation, I therefore suggest a minor modification to the name of Gambica’s new lab manager’s group. Let’s call it the British Laboratory Managers’ Establishment, rather than Association. That way the acronym can be BLAME, which is what the poor old lab managers are used to taking anyway.

Speaking of blame, I have to point the finger across the Atlantic for the growth in what I like to think of as ‘missionbabble’. Our American cousins are the real driving force behind the evolution of the English language these days, and much of this is to the good. However, along with an inability to spell simple chemical names like sulphur and aluminium correctly, Americans do have a habit of using three or four words where one will do – such as horse-back riding instead of simply riding.

Combine this tendency with the spoon-feeding culture that has grown in the last decade or two in a bid to keep ‘the markets’ happy, because share prices are dependent on traders who know nothing about anything, and the missionbabble explosion is all too easy to understand.

My final example, I think, explains this all too well. US laboratory supplies company Wheaton (look! I described the organisation in four words!) has announced that its UK subsidiary Lab Supplies will adopt the corporate name. I wonder if it will also adopt the corporate mission statement – a masterpiece of obfuscation so extreme that I genuinely haven’t got space here to run it in full.

In just 109 words, this mission statement describes the company’s admiration for science and scientists and explains that this is what drives it forward. It would take five full Tweets to share this guff with the internet, and yet nowhere does it spell out a single thing that the company actually does.

My mission from GAWD, the group of associations of web dorks, is complete.