General

Here’s an excerpt from a punchy, funny book review by Richard J. Tofel that you won’t be able to read because it’s in the WSJ. The book being reviewed is 101 Mission Statements from Top Companies by Jeffrey Abrahams. Chip and I are both continually shocked by the fact that the average corporate mission statement is long on statement and short on mission.

Alcoa is a big company. They make some of the best aluminum on Earth. Once upon a time, they made all of the aluminum, but that is another story. Our story is about vision. What is Alcoa’s vision? “At Alcoa, our vision is to be the best company in the world.” What?

Hershey is a less-big company. They make some of the best chocolate on Earth. Hershey has a 65-word mission. It includes “Undisputed Marketplace Leadership” and “top-tier value creation” from a “portfolio of brands.” Not one of the 65 words is “chocolate.” Huh? …

In fact, a certain kind of mission statement — well phrased and properly promulgated — can inspire companies and the people who work in them. It can help managers remember what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s beyond the scope of their enterprise. It can guide a company’s decisions about allocating capital. But to do so it must have content, and most of the samples on display in “101 Mission Statements” don’t.

A few pass the test, though. Johnson & Johnson’s adherence to its “credo” saved the company from disaster. Its pledge of “first responsibility” to “doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers” was cited, in 1982, as the reason for the famous recall of Tylenol, one of J&J’s products. Ben & Jerry’s sells not just fine ice cream but “euphoric concoctions.” (True enough.) The Coca-Cola Co.’s flagship product is so iconic that the company can allude to its own historic advertising when defining its ambition: “to benefit and refresh everyone it touches.”

Achieving such clarity does not require that companies operate in an especially exciting line of work. Progressive Insurance’s vision is prosaic but compelling: “to reduce the human trauma and economic costs associated with automobile accidents.”

As always, a sense of humor can make a difference. What defines the identity of a particular breakfast-food manufacturer? Not the key words “excellence” or “shareholders” or even “unique.” Instead, the Kellogg Co. says of itself: “We build Gr-r-reat brands and make the world a little happier by bringing our best to you.” When you get it right, you can even leave out the word “cereal.”

Check out this NYT article from Sunday — there’s a great high-concept pitch in it. Thanks to John Moore for the link. The money excerpt:

In 2000, Mr. Barr and Nils B. Lahr, a former Microsoft engineer, started Synergy Sports Technology in Phoenix, to bring together for N.B.A. coaches fine-grained statistics matched with associated video clips. Want to stop Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks? Synergy’s system has recorded every offensive step Mr. Nowitzki has made since he joined the league in 1998. Synergy has captured, for example, how successful he is driving right, or left, differentiating between home and away games, and further slicing and dicing into sub-sub-sub-categories. Click on any statistic and you can get video clips from the last three seasons of 20, or 50, or even 2,000 plays that show Nowitzki making that particular move.

Four teams signed up for Synergy’s beta service in the 2004-05 season. Mark Cuban, the owner of one of those intrepid first teams, the Dallas Mavericks, liked what he saw and became Synergy’s primary outside investor. When the service was formally rolled out for the 2005-06 season, the two teams that reached the finals happened to be the Mavericks and the Miami Heat, another Synergy client.

Most teams, however, did not jump to subscribe, and Mr. Barr groped for the most effective way of describing the value of his service to general managers. When he tried the phrase “it’s Google for basketball,” one manager excitedly said, “Now that’s something I can take to my owner.”

Our column “Polarize Me,” from the April issue of Fast Company, is now available online.

There are two bloggers who have done multi-post series on Made to Stick recently — they are nice introductions to the book and its concepts for people who haven’t read it. I am learning a lot from the insights that they are bringing to the book.

First, there’s Cam Beck at ChaosScenario. Here are the MTS-related posts: Boil it down to just one thing. Get their attention and keep it. Hit your audience with a ton of bricks. Earning the trust of strangers. [Stay tuned to Cam’s blog for posts on Emotion and Stories.]

Then, there’s Katya Andresen from Network for Good, whose blog is a must-read for non-profit marketers. She shows how the principles in MTS can be applied to social enterprise marketing, which is something that Chip and I are passionate about. Here are the posts: Finding your core aka sweet spot. Go for the unexpected. Hang your message on hooks. Emotion and calculation.

It’s a surprising fact, a fact that warns of overpopulation and a world teetering on the edge of exhaustion: The number of people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived.

And it’s dead wrong. Ciara Curtin in the Scientific American does a nice dismantling of this urban legend.

Why did this falsehood spread? It has the snap of unexpectedness that you find in a lot of scientific-ish urban legends. (You only use 10% of your brain!) It balances that surprise factor by tapping into our sense of concern and anxiety for the world. (Have we pushed the planet too far?)

The surprise value and emotional resonance are garden-variety strengths of urban legends. This legend has another tricky feature, though. It appeals to our intuition about exponential numbers — for instance, if you take a sequence like 3^2, 3^3, 3^4, …, each successive number is greater than the sum of all the numbers before it in the sequence. If we have the (mistaken) sense that the earth’s population works like this sequence, the urban legend would seem quite reasonable. (It might even, perversely, make us feel smarter to believe it than not to believe it, since in tracing the exponential logic in our heads, we might flatter ourselves to believe we had solved the logic puzzle that explained a surprising “finding.”)