Initial Post 04_28_2008

The fact remains that an entrepreneur who wishes to create assets only to the full scope of his capacity, can only grow the business to a size that can be supported by that capacity. However, an entrepreneur who wishes to found a corporation  must necessarily enhance the scope of his capacity and accordingly institute division of labor, which results in an internal drive for efficiency in the performance of the business functional tasks, and bring onboard other peoples to join in the performance of the tasks leading to the realization of the founding vision.

This vision of the entrepreneur therefore becomes the core vision for founding the corporation, and as such, this vision must be lucidly communicated to every employee who comes for and takes on an employment with the corporation; further the employee must be continually reminded of this vision, so as to ensure that all the employees share the same vision: The Founding vision; such that the entire work-force of the corporation works, and walks in lock-step, towards to realization of the entrepreneur's vision. In view of this demand the entrepreneur must ensure that the corporation embodies and remains true to this founding vision, that until now has been abstract, having been conceived only in that singular mind, by documenting it for all associates and employees of the corporation.

The Vision of the entrepreneur on which the development of the venture rest, must necessarily be effectively documented by the entrepreneur to help shape the attitude of the prospective employees.

The vision is usually documented in two forms:  Documentation in terms of the Company Business and Documentation in terms of the Mission Statement. The Company Business format of the documentation provides the pragmatic orientation of the vision that necessarily forces the development of procedures for producing the end-product of the vision. The Mission Statement format of the documentation is more of an abstract definition aimed as a guide at the level of the Being of the employees, therefore more motivational than pragmatic; and it is at this motivational level of the vision that also is the state at which shared vision is established. Hence, it is also at this motivational level that much care must be taken in crafting the entrepreneurial vision.

This need to craft the vision in motivational terms, of course, becomes irrelevant, if the entrepreneur opts to not in fact develop a venture. Then, of course, the entrepreneur would not qualify as one. Otherwise, then the entrepreneur must craft the mission statement.

Now then, a good Mission Statement must recognize the needs of all the stakeholders of the corporation and set the corporation such as to cater to those needs with an acceptable level of balance with respect to each stakeholder category. For every corporation there are three categories of stakeholders, which are General Public, Employees and Associates, listed in the order of importance, and where the Associates represent the equity-owners. Some corporations do prefer to list, in order of importance, the stakeholders in the reverse order; however, any responsible corporation list the stakeholders in the order given above; and a well-crafted Mission Statement also follows the same order as above.

Fundamentally, a good Mission Statement must embody consideration for a balance between philanthropy and capitalism, consideration of humanitarian goal, and of course consideration, albeit implicit, for intrinsic capitalist goal for wealth. In addition, a well-crafted Mission Statement must be terse, and yet be uplifting to anyone reading it, including the would-be employee so much so that the prospective employee wants to be part of such a great adventure or quest that has a greater good for its object.

Besides, a good Mission Statement must be a coherent mesh of consideration for all the stakeholders. Hence, a recommended approach is for the entrepreneur to craft a sentence each, directed to each of the stakeholder category; and then string the three sentences into a single sentence and finally edit the resulting sentence for coherence.

In light of the guide given so far then, a first draft Mission Statement for The Fictional Corporation, that sells widgets, as is usually the norm, may have the generic sample of the form:

Mission Statement (sample)
The Fictional Corporation is in the Mission of making available to every human being the humanitarian functionality provided by widgets, by supporting manifestation of the functionality with widgets; The Fictional Corporation is fully committed to providing the environment in which the staff perform the tasks with great pride and zeal, producing widgets which provide the humanitarian functionality; The Fictional Corporation is committed to providing superior return on investment to the Associates in appreciation of their participation in this humanitarian project.

By this template, the entrepreneur should develop a first draft of the Mission Statement, though granted awkward sounding, but a start nonetheless. Needless to state though, that for the entrepreneur to identify the great humanitarian functionality of the widgets, to be reflected in the Mission Statement, the 

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 entrepreneur must discern a market of the product within which such uplifting functionality can be elicited. Of course, the concatenation of a sentence, as is the Mission Statement, can be significantly improved by eliminating all the "The Fictional Corporation" but one - the first occurrence, and making the three sentences into a single sentence, such that the entire statement seems to have been written in terms of a single sentence. After this, whether or not the Mission Statement is still further improved upon is entirely at the discretion, the level of fastidiousness, the esotericism, flair with words, and general evocativeness of the entrepreneur. Yet, note should be made of the fact that evocativeness is a subjective matter and as such is not of practical consideration in the crafting of a Mission Statement.

Even then, an entrepreneur must still recognize that need to make terse the Mission Statement as to enable its easy imprinting in the minds of the employees, and for memorizations by employees who may want to engage in recitations.