Some businesses spend hours at management retreats, and engage in the services of high powered consultants to determine their Mission Statement tag line. And it is true that in our case, the process of reaching this conclusion took more than a year from the time we first raised the topic in one of our bi-annual planning/review meetings.
But the actual resolution of the question took us, well, about 15 minutes.
Yesterday, I posted our mission statement on this blog. Daniel Smith quickly penned this email to me:
I read your posting about the mission statement and tag line and I had a thought about an approach that might work. After some fiddling around, this is what I came up with:
The Construction News Group:
Breaking new ground,
Building new bonds and
Delivering news you can use every day.
The idea was to parallel the process of a development - first ground is Broken, then the Build starts and when done, the building is said to be Delivered.
At the same time the alliteration kind of flows (I think), it touches on three main purposes of our organization (innovation, building relationships and delivering relevant news) and it maintains the little "news you can use" bit, too, which I personally really like about the current tag line.
Obviously this is just a rough suggestion and could be changed as everyone sees fit. But what do you think?
I liked Daniel's thinking and Tag Line, so quickly added it to the agenda for our regular Monday staff meeting, along with several other topics.
At 1:30 p.m. yesterday afternoon, we went around the table (figuratively, as most of us participated in the meeting via teleconference) and our team universally agreed that Daniel's tag line makes sense, and should be implemented.
So you'll soon see it on our websites, and in printed materials.
Wow. After more than a year, we resolved the entire thing in a matter of minutes in one day!
That of course is the nature of healthy business in 2008. Not forcing issues; we can use new communications tools to speed up the process of adaptation and dissemination of good ideas, with respect for the originator's creativity, and the collaboration of the team. Note how this blog and our regular meeting system (and note that our weekly meetings never run more than an hour -- and this week we finished a fairly heavy agenda in 40 minutes) allowed what could have been a truly time consuming business process to conclude in minutes. But equally, while Daniel only needed a few minutes to write our new Tag Line, the process underlying to form the understanding of what is right took months. And that is the nature of most marketing and business development in our industry.
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3 comments:
Mark,
Just a thought here, but perhaps we could invite your readers to give their feedback on the proposed tag before we implement it fully. This is, after all, meant to be the public face of our broader mission statement, so who better to say if it truly works and communicates what we do than your readers?
Sure, though we need to define this -- we can't expect our clients to make this decision. However, input is always invited!
Mark, Understood. So perhaps you could post a general question asking people what they think and we can review any comments next week as a group and make a final decision about whether this is truly "It", or needs tweaking! Of course I think it's just perfect, but I might be a tad bit biased... just kidding :P
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