Corporate Mission Statements: The Bottom Line

Developing a mission statement is an important first step in the strategic planning process, according to both practitioners and research scholars.' Several recent books on strategic management include entire chapters on mission statements, which attest to their perceived importance in the strategy formulation process. Nevertheless, the components of mission statements are among the least empirically examined issues in strategic management. No reported empirical studies describe the composition of business mission statements, only a few conceptual articles suggest desirable component characteristics, and no reported attempts have been made to link mission statements to corporate performance. This neglect is surprising since several studies have concluded that firms that engage in strategic planning outperform firms that do not.2 Thus, the research reported in this paper focused on the nature and role of mission statements in organizational processes; its goal was to improve our understanding of the link between strategic planning and firm performance.