Lots of companies chalk up their success in part to having a mission statement. So I decided to give the concept a try for my personal life. I found a mission statement wizard on the Franklin Covey website. While clicking through the screens and answering questions about my deepest values, I had a choice of soundtrack themes: inspirational, motivational or reflective.

The wizard spit out a list of value statements from which I'm supposed to craft my personal mission. I received it via e-mail, and it now languishes among get-to-it-eventually requests and German-language spam.

Count me among the mission statement cynics. After all, how powerful can a sentence that sums up of the purpose of a company — or a person — really be? Whether it's etched on a plaque in the lobby, printed on employees' memo pads or recited daily like a pledge, a mission statement is still just words.

Or so I thought. Then I talked to Steve Smith.

Smith is president of Tec Laboratories in Albany, Oregon Business' No. 4 small Best Company to Work For in 2005. Smith is a true believer in the well-crafted mission statement.

"It gives you clarity of direction," he explains with breathless enthusiasm. Your to-do list has short-term goals, annual goals — the mission statement, he says, is the über goal.

"Tec Labs is a pharmaceutical institution that fosters a culture of innovation, trust, joie de vivre and espirit de corps," recites Smith. Short, to the point, a little French-y.

But those words have deep roots for Tec Labs employees. Take "institution." It evokes something that's around for the ages, such as a university or a foundation. "We keep that in mind when we're making capital spending or hiring decisions," Smith says. "We always wait until we can afford the best because I know the business is going to survive me."

And that joie de vivre? "We want to make Tec a fun place to work."

About 10 years ago, Smith sat down with Tec's board members and hammered out the statement. "It started to define the other things we put in place," he says. The private, 27-employee company formed self-directed employee teams several years later, then adopted open-book financial management and 360-degree peer evaluations. "It's like tuning a violin," Smith says.

The mission statment has remained pretty constant over the years, aside from dropping a reference to insect repellent — an area that the company, which makes anti-itch pharmaceuticals, is gradually moving away from. Smith is hanging the statement up in the company's common area and getting it printed on employee shirts.

So how can a company start a love-fest with its own mission statement?

"A good mission statement answers the following questions: What is our business? Who is our customer? What does a customer value? What should our business become?" says Debra Ringold, associate dean of Willamette University's Atkinson Graduate School of Management.

Ringold adds that a mission statement can and should be revised along the way — especially when major policies or values have shifted, or the competitive environment has changed.

But simply rewriting a mission statement when things take a turn for the worse strikes David Sibbet, president of San Francisco-based The Grove Consultants International, as a mistake. He says it's like a fat person getting liposuction rather than altering their diet and lifestyle.

"A lot of executives can get out of touch with what their companies really do," says Sibbet. "They want a mission statement that sounds good. That's not how you do it. It should be the frosting on the cake of a whole process that asks: 'What's really the success model here?'"

Sibbet worked with Oregon-based Merix Corp. in the late '90s on an image-driven mission statement — a graphic of a spaceship with the statement written on the ship's side — that landed Sibbet and then-CEO Debi Coleman on the pages of Fast Company magazine. These days, Merix's mission statement is essentially the same but the spaceship is gone.

Sibbet says that if the organization's leadership buys in, the mission statement will have legs. He points to Apple, whose mission, he says, is basically to make the coolest technology around. Sibbet thinks CEO Steve Jobs is the living embodiment of that mission: "He's hard to deal with because he's so intense, but when the leadership is fully engaged, people pay attention."

Chris Edwards, whose business consultancy, Edwards and Company, is based in Eugene, agrees. He says that small companies or startups that are still honing their business plan may not need a mission statement.

"Mission statements can be clichŽ, but they also have the potential to be powerful management tools when crafted with respect for the process and with the help of a third-party facilitator," Edwards says. "Many companies don't seize on the opportunity because they're not looking for anything beyond the statement itself."

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MISSION STATEMENTS

"To be a world-class leader in the development, manufacture, sale and support of small-scale fuel cell systems and components for global portable and stationary applications."
— IdaTech, Bend, maker of fuel cells

"We work for the customer."
— Bear Creek Corp., Medford, direct marketer, Jackson & Perkins, Harry and David

"Be a world-class legal service provider dedicated to uncompromising integrity and quality by adhering to our principles."
— Perkins Coie, Portland, law firm

"Wieden+Kennedy is an independent, creatively led advertising agency that exists to create strong and provocative relationships between good companies and their consumers."
— Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, advertising agency

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RESOURCES

Books

• Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap and others don't by John Collins
• The Mission Statement Book: 301 corporate mission statements from America's top companies by Jeffrey Abrahams
• How to Develop and Use a Personal Mission Statement by Stephen R. Covey