Set your mission
If you have a mission statement that’s a page long, nobody is going to remember it, let alone work toward carrying it out. When you set your mission, you have to keep it short. NETGEAR’s is just two sentences long.
“We purposely make the mission very simple, …” Lo says. “It’s easy for people to understand and remember that.”
On top of being simple, you have to absolutely be passionate about your mission.
“If you do not believe in it yourself, you won’t be able to sell it to other people,” he says. “You’re going to start with yourself and your co-founders or your management team, and let it permeate down so every employee will be able to sell that mission and abide by it every day. That’s very important, and if you find it very hard to sell that idea, you might be on the wrong thing.”
Your mission also needs to be something grand and exciting if you want people to share your passion in it.
“Take your time and find out the mission that is what we call noble and grand and is a long-lasting one,” Lo says. “That’s the only way to keep you going and keep the team going. You might not hit it in the first days, but after a few innings, you should be able to find one. If you’re down to the fifth inning, and you still don’t know yet, then you probably need to quit.”
Finding your mission in some fields may be more obvious, but if you’re not sure what the passion point in your business is, look at the bigger picture. For example, Lo says if you want to open a factory to manufacture clothes, it may seem like there’s nothing exciting there, but that’s not the case.
“You can say, ‘I’m going to prove to the rest of the world that the U.S. workers will be able to master skills and machineries and processes to make first-class garments that will be welcomed abroad and beat the Chinese,’” he says. “That’s a grand and noble mission. Or the reverse — you’re in China, and you open up a factory, and you say, ‘We’re going to build a factory that doesn’t just raise the level of craftsmanship but also the level of design that the garments produced in this factory will rival those coming out of France and Italy.’ That’s a noble mission.”
If you can’t find something that exciting to drive people’s competitive side, look at the very basics.
“Even at the very mundane — I’m opening a factory in Pakistan or wherever that will be able to make this the most efficient and low cost for producing, bar none, anywhere, anytime,” he says. “That’s good, too. No matter how mundane it is, you will be able to find something. The important thing is, what is the end result? The end result has to absolutely be that you make people’s lives better — either the customers’ or the workers’. If you don’t do that, it’s not going to last.”
