ABOUT PURPOSE AND MISSION

In the course of my twenty seven years of consulting with nonprofit boards of directors throughout the U.S. and Canada. I wrote a monthly series of articles (175 in all) called "BOARD SENSE – Common Sense For Nonprofit Board Members" which I distributed to national associations who, in turn, re-distributed them to their local nonprofit member organizations. I was therefore surprised when quite a large number of these board members would tell me at workshops or conferences that what I was writing for my nonprofit clients applied in large measure to the businesses, large and small, which these board members owned or worked for. In the last four years before I retired I switched distribution of BOARD SENSE to the Internet and when I finally stopped, I had over eight hundred subscribers world wide.

Thinking that many of you who read my blogs might find this information useful in whatever type of board you might be involved with I decided to make a number of them available here. For those of you who have little or no interest in this subject, fear not, as I will not allow this one topic to dominate the subjects I will be writing about – except for the first five or six until I feel I have an audience for this type of material. Here now is the second of the first set of six blogs in this series.

ABOUT PURPOSE AND MISSION

Since time immemorial, these two words, purpose and mission, have been used interchangeably as meaning the same thing. However, in 1986, one Jonathan Cook, who was until his untimely death the CEO of an organization known as The Support Centers, wrote an article titled "Defining Purpose." In this article he took for the first time the position that purpose and mission were not the same. Closely related, one derived from the other, but still different. I came across Cook's article late in 1989. Upon reading it I was immediately impressed with his argument and after thinking about about it for a pair of months, adopted it in my own work with, of course, due attribution to Cook for having (as far as I knew) been the first to articulate it.

The first, the statement of purpose, should define the reasons WHY you have organized. Or, to put it another way, what ultimate result is expected to be achieved because your organization exists? The focus of the purpose is upon the word "why". The mission statement, on the other hand, is concerned with "what." What will your organization do in order to achieve this purpose? Or, to borrow from Drucker, what is your business or what ought it to be? The mission statement will then be broken down into more manageable units which we call "mission related goals." These will be discussed in a future blog.

I have often found it difficult to convince clients that making this distinction is useful - that is until they themselves actually wrestle with these terms and develop for their own organizations a purpose and a mission. Suffice it to say here that you may have observed or have been a part of an organization which became so busy with what it was doing that it lost sight of why it was doing what it was doing - a case of the means becoming the ends! When an organization loses sight of its real reasons for existence - its why - it is likely to begin making decisions about what it should be doing that actually work against its ability to fulfill its primary reasons for existence. Such a situation has been the first step on the road to failure for too many nonprofit, as well as for proprietary organizations. Cook compares the purpose to a beacon which draws you on, straight and undeviatingly
towards your ultimate destination. An apt comparison.

Your purpose need not be unique, only to your organization. It might be very large in scope - so large that no one organization could ever hope to achieve it single handedly. For example: "To prevent deafness" is a purpose clearly beyond the ability of any single organization to accomplish. In such circumstances it will fall to your mission statement to, in effect, carve out your organization's niche in such a large purpose by detailing what your organization will do in the overall effort to prevent deafness. Neither need your purpose be completely attainable. The purpose of preventing deafness, is, for example, most unlikely to be completely achieved for the foreseeable future, if ever.

On the other hand, the nature of your organization may be such that your purpose can, in time, be completely achieved by your organization alone. In the course of my work, I read many so-called statements of purpose which are really - using these definitions - mission statements since they state what the organization will do but overlook telling us why they will do it. I cannot tell you that this concept has become widely held as yet. However, since adopting Cook's concept I have assisted a number of organizations in their strategic planning and yet every one of these the organizations came around to adopting the idea of establishing both purpose and mission statements.

Do not overlook the public relations value of your purpose statement which is one of the reasons that the purpose statement should be as succinct as possible. It should be featured on your letterheads, envelopes and all other important papers and documents. It should be on any signs and over your office door. It should appear in any location that will help tell the world who you are and why you exist as an organization.

Your board should review both its purpose and its mission annually. Because of its very fundamental nature, your purpose is unlikely to change with any frequency. Yet there could come a time when a change in your organization's purpose becomes necessary. The mission, being more volatile, is more readily subject to change. Demographic changes, funding changes, cultural changes, political changes, economic changes, new needs arising, competition and the like, all can affect your mission. Thus the need to review your mission annually and, once again, preferably within a strategic or long range planning process.

There is a reluctance on the part of some people to become involved in change - often caused by a fear of breaking away from familiar territory, or simply not wanting to make the necessary exertion. The need for change or transition will have been amply demonstrated, but then someone suggests that this is, perhaps, not quite the right time to undertake the transition, and the change is put off, usually indefinitely. I would suggest to you that being involved in change or transition can add a good deal of zest to the business of being a member of the board and is not something to be feared. And, so, if your board has determined that some important change is necessary concerning your mission or its related goals, don't be afraid to undertake the change. You will do your organization a lot of good and, in the process, you will all gain a greater degree of satisfaction from your efforts. I say this to you from the experience of service on some thirty boards from which my most satisfying and memorable experiences came from those in which we were involved in major change or transition while I was a member.


Andrew Swanson is also the author of a recently published novel "The Grantor" and you will find it described in my first blog under that title. The blog provides a description of the novel and instructions as to how to order it. It is also currently listed by Amazon Books, Barnes and Noble, and Borders. Barnes and Noble's listing not only contains a summary of the book but includes a chapter long excerpt for you to read.

Swanson is also an independent distributor for the Shaklee Corporation who, among some 250 products, manufactures a truly remarkable product called Vivix. Vivix provides an extended life span (up to age 125) for its users and overall good health for its users which makes the extension of user life possible. Vivix is described in a previous blog under the title "My Experience With Vivix". This blog also provides more description as well as ordering information.