A portal to great missions

This work-in-progress post is part of a set on the topic of mission, vision, and strategy.

It’s widely agreed that if you want your company or team to do great things, it’s all but necessary to have a great mission. And yet the vast majority of companies and teams either don’t have anything like a mission, or else what they have is far from great. Why do so few orgs have great missions?

Furthermore, if you read business books and online articles on mission and strategy, you have to read a lot of material to get a little value. Can we come up with an understanding of the anatomy of a great mission that’s actually useful? More importantly, can we distill or create a useful, actionable procedure or framework that if followed will reliably lead to great missions?

In other words, can we create a portal to great missions? That there is the mission of this series.