Apple picking yesterday, so now there is a huge bag of varied apples on kitchen table. It cheers me immensely.
Maybe it’s because I’ve had to come in for two extra meetings at work on my supposed day off or because in a number of areas of my life I’ve been encountering a lot of discussion of “leadership” and “vision”, but today I’m feeling little or know patience with the entire notion of group action in business entities through the “mission statement” model. It seems to me that when orgainzations don’t want to have a big internal fights, they tinker with the mission statements. The sequence of thought seems to be something like this: ogranizations succeed by acheiving internal alignment among their employies, through getting buy-in on a worthwhile mission. Thus to do what they need to do, organizations must come up with a statement of purpose through internal disssions among the interested parties, working in concert.
Do I feel better coming into work because I am in agreement with a mission statement? Will I eat at Applebee’s because they have a mission statement I can agree with?
It seems to me that the growth of instruments like mission statements and workplace community building has paralleled the creeping sense in the late part of the last century that public life has become corrupt and empty. Supposedly we now look to workplace culture to provide us with a spiritually fulfilling life. On the corporate end the move to mission statements has accompanied the shift from a manufacturing to an information based business model.
Do we make enlightened choices about where we work based on the mission of those organizations? Can a mission statement change the culture of a workplace? If so how often is it used to do?
What does it mean to talk about the “mission” of a business? Or the “vision?” These are terms adapted from either from the military or from organized religion.
For me the pleasures of working come from the satisfaction that derives from solving problems and fostering creativity: helping people make things. I like being around art and artists.
It’s unreasonable to imagine that every workplace become a place of spiritual fulfillment. This is a papering over of the basically alienating nature of labor under capitalism with a sheaf of self help homilies.
Tags: crabby, daily photo, work