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Chapter 3

Mission

Part II - Raise Your Standards

What Does It Mean to Be Mission Driven?

  • A clear and compelling sense of mission has been one of the essential keys to our consistent success and growth.

  • Being on a mission is a visceral experience, not merely an intellectual one.

  • When your organization has a well‐defined purpose, you feel it down to your bones. You feel energized when you start the workday, and you feel good about whatever progress you've made toward the mission when you shut down for the night.

  • Being on a mission unlocks the X factor: an intangible that can drastically elevate performance as people set out to achieve greatness—together. It makes your working life not just more productive but also more fun.

  • Of course every company should know exactly why it exists and what it's trying to accomplish, and of course it should communicate that purpose clearly to everyone.

  • Many companies are fuzzy, if not hopelessly confused, about why they exist.

A Great Mission Is Big (but Not Impossible!)

  • Snowflake's current mission is to mobilize the world's data by building the world's greatest data and applications platform, not just of the cloud era, but in the history of computing.
  • At Data Domain, the mission was to put tape automation out of existence as a data backup and recovery platform and replace it with ultra‐efficient, high‐speed disks and networks.
  • ServiceNow set out to become the new global standard for IT service and operations management.

A Great Mission Is Clear

  • A great mission helps prevent distractions that dilute everyone's focus. Distractions are a huge threat. They often become a major source of self‐defeating behavior.
  • It's incredibly easy for managers to react to every headline that crosses their email inbox, Slack, or social media feeds.
  • If you turn your time and attention to the latest shiny object, regardless of how little it has to do with your mission, you are on the path to trouble.
  • Distractions will inevitably pop up every day and need to be fought relentlessly.
  • People use the term mission creep when an organization's stated purpose keeps changing and/or being redefined. We must show constant vigilance against the risk of mission creep.

A Great Mission Is Not About Money

  • It's essential to make it clear to everyone that your organization's purpose is not exceeding Wall Street's quarterly expectations or other financial targets.

  • All of our companies had a true purpose of bringing good things to the world and improving the lives of our customers and employees.

  • Data domain was about a better backup solution - their product was better than the status quo of tape backup

  • ServiceNow was to be the enterprise resource planning for IT and a workflow platform for all service domains.

  • Snowflake set out to reinvent the fundamentals of big‐data processing, which previously took place on specialized data warehousing platforms as well as large‐scale general database management platforms from the likes of Oracle and Microsoft.

  • The financial success was a byproduct of these missions.

  • Most of our staff also participate meaningfully in value creation.

  • What our employees do lead to their own life changing gains - buying homes, educating their children, securing retirements

  • I would sometimes say in all‐hands meetings that I was personally committed to help each of our employees reach a different station in life as a function of the company's fortunes. In exchange, I was asking for the best they had to offer.

    • That was the deal: we do the best we can for each other.

How to Nurture the Mission

Once you have your mission in place, how do you get everyone to embrace it and make it real?

The four keys:

  • applying focus
  • urgency
  • execution
  • strategy

Applying focus​

If people don't focus on the mission, they are not really on a mission. We concentrate our resources and bandwidth on the mission, and we avoid distractions.

Urgency​

Time is not our friend.

Execution​

We have to execute on our mission via an organized, orchestrated, and resourced set of activities. We have no chance accomplishing it without a drive for world‐class execution, which includes high standards and efficient use of resources.

Strategy​

Strategies don't change day‐to‐day, only when there is a demonstrably better way to do things or if something just isn't working, unrelated to execution failure.

Everyone needs to feel confident that our strategy is in line with the goals of our mission.

Living the Mission Every Day

  • Will this help us get to the mission faster?

  • What else can we do to move closer to the mission and get there quicker?

  • Mission driven is not just what you believe, it's how you make decisions every day about your time and effort and resources.

  • We expect everybody to embrace the mission with everything they've got. This company is counting on our people 100%. All hands on deck, at all times.