The mission statement

The older I've gotten, the more I've noticed that mission statements are taking over the world.  I'm not sure why that is.  I've had to wrestle with mission statements at work, and they are no fun.  Especially when you get a bunch of academics together.  It's possible to spend hours going back and forth on a mission statement and getting very little accomplished, all while you try to work together to hammer together what usually turns out to be a rather spectacular, distended collection of phrases and clauses to sum up what it is you're supposed to do. 

(The really fun part?  All the time you spend putting together the mission statement is that much less time you spend on those things you describe in your mission statement.  I wonder what a mission statement committee would have as its mission statement.  Is it possible to have a mission statement for a mission statement?  Oh, crap, I wish I hadn't said that.  Now somebody's going to read this, and that will become the next big managerial craze.)

It's not just at work that you find mission statements.  You see them hanging on restaurant walls and in menus.  When you join a club, even at the local chapter level, you see mission statements, and the inevitable debates come out of it.  Can we do this or that?  Well, it's not in our mission statement, so I don't know if we can or should.  I'm aware of the "good fences make good neighbors" value of mission statements, yes, but sometimes I wonder if they don't exist for their own sake.

I've never really defined a mission for this website, and I don't plan to.  For one, it would be too much like work if I did.  Second, how would I build fences around it?  I like the freedom to explore any area I wish, to post what I'm thinking, to share with you the things I've found that make my life more vivid. 

Back when I first started publicly blogging in earnest a couple years back, it was when I was going through flight training, and I tried to keep the emphasis on aviation-related matters.  That ran out of steam for several reasons.  For one, I really didn't have anything original to say.  There are so many other bigger and better websites about flying out there, written by people who know more than I ever will and who could run circles around me.  Of course, the biggest crimp in it was that time and finances called a halt to my flight training.  That was both a practical roadblock, and an emotional one.  It literally hurt to write about flying when I couldn't any longer.  (Part of why Pam from the American version of The Office resonates with me on a very deep level is that her frustrated dream of taking art classes and becoming an artist reminds me, in so many ways, of my similar efforts with aviation.)

But a few months later, I picked blogging back up, mostly as a lazy way to display some of the artifacts in my collection.  I started writing about other things that interested me, and eventually re-used the old blog's name and URL.  (It was already paid for, and it was easier than coming up with something new.)  And then the site kept going.  How do I write a mission statement for all that?  Easy.  I don't.  To me, a mission statement in this kind of off-duty context would just put limitations on something that's about not having limitations.

Oh, crap.  That almost sounded like a mission statement.

Comments

[Warren]

I agree wholeheartedly. If you know what you're doing, you don't need a mission statement, and if you don't know what you're doing, is one really going to help that much?