Authentic Leadership and Organizations: The Goffee-Jones Collection (2 Books)

Chapter 4

Stand for Something Real

Putting Authenticity at the Core

Organizational mission statements are famous for their meaningless verbosity, a fact on which the hugely popular website Dilbert’s Automatic Mission Statement Generator capitalized for a while (sadly, it was taken down a few years ago, much to the chagrin of its fans). Consider, for example, the following two mission statements:

“To continually foster world-class infrastructures as well as to quickly create principle-centered sources to meet our customer’s needs.”

“Respect, integrity, communication and excellence.”¹

While the first statement lends new meaning to the word ambiguous—and it is, in fact, the product of the Dilbert generator—no doubt we’ve all seen statements similarly ...