Naming your organizations’ beliefs can guide decisions and inspire talent much more effectively than the traditional mission statement, which is usually pretty flat, descriptive and, well, boring.
Here are some examples of organizations’ beliefs.
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.
Zappos
- Deliver WOW Through Service
- Embrace and Drive Change
- Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
- Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
- Pursue Growth and Learning
- Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
- Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
- Do More With Less
- Be Passionate and Determined
- Be Humble
And my firm, Beeline Labs:
- Deliver the wow and the whoa
- Activate change
- Go fast
- Try new things; OK to fail
- See new possibilities early
- Don’t compromise; the work needs to be meaningful
- It’s all about delivering business value
- Bee vs. me
- Integrity rules
What are your organization’s beliefs? Please share!
Thanks for the great take! It is all about what an organization believes, because behavior always follows belief.
Amaze and delight our clients.
We’re all stakeholders.
Power of collaboration.
I can’t say that I can officially share my companies Beliefs. But I could not agree more that they are more powerful than any Mission Statement. I’ve helped many brands bring a marketing message to market and there is little that is more important than understanding their core values, beliefs or value proposition. Often it is the DNA that runs through both their internal organization and their external communications. What I find interesting is how a brand’s beliefs don’t always align with what the public sees. Focus groups and consumer research can get underneath some of this misalignment but a recent site Brand Tags is an interesting experiment that aims to present people’s collective perceptions of hundreds of well known brands. Visitors are shown a series of random logos and asked to provide one word responses all of which are presented tag cloud style.
It’s a fascinating crowdsourcing experiment and bound to be eye opening for many marketers.