Obvious Mission Statement

Been doing some thinking about Mission Statements recently. I just dislike the phrase Mission Statement - they seem so 90s somehow. In the movie Jerry Mcguire, Cruise is adamant that he is not writing "a memo, its a Mission Statement."

Is there a better phrase than Mission Statement do you think?

At the moment I prefer simply the word "Ambition" or maybe "Vision"

The most interesting Mission Statement/Vision/Ambition that I have come across recently belongs to the folks at Obvious:

Hi, we’re Obvious™. Our goal is to create interesting things that matter to the world.

Short and sweet and to the point.

The founder of Obvious is Evan Williams. His is an interesting story: Evan co-founded Pyra Labs and set up Blogger to help the team coordinating their effort in building software. Along the way, Evan figured out that Blogger was actually more useful than the software that they were developing, and then he ditched the original idea and went with Blogger, which was eventually acquired by Google. Evan believes in this "stumbled upon" process so strongly that he founded “Obvious”, with the mission to “create interesting things that matter to the world” by productizing the “stumble upon” process.  BTW, Twitter is a direct result of “Obvious”

I love the attitude of “You Don’t Have To Know What You Are Doing, As Long As You Have The Capability And The Willingness To Try Hard” but I also really liked the neat articulation of their company's philosophy.

Comments

[Stephen Davies]

Guy Kawasaki said don't have a mission statement but have a 'mantra'.

This is a really good presentation given by him where he explains why, titled "The Art of the Start", based on his book of the same name.

[Stephen Davies]

Whoops! Forgot the link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3755718939216161559&hl=en

[neilperkin]

The best mission statement I ever saw is Robert Kalin of Etsy.com reading the childrens book "Swimmy The Fish".
http://blip.tv/file/631073/
Somehow sums up the philosophy of the company far better than a dry statement on a website ever could.