Great missions are great except for when they’re not

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

There are some ways in which a strongly mission-oriented company culture can be bad, or perceived as bad by outsiders. Those include:

• Ya’ll are weird. You say things that are outside the Overton window.
• Ya’ll think the same way, so I mistrust your epistemics —you’re probably groupthinkers.
• Ya’ll think the same way, so I mistrust your epistemics — you probably have extremists in your midst.
• Ya’ll are aiming for the wrong thing. You’re gung-ho about getting to world X, and world X is bad.
• Ya’ll are aiming for the right thing but in the wrong way. You think Y is the best way to get to X, but Y is actually terrible compared to other available ways of getting there.
• Ya’ll are doing something like spiritual bypassing but for ethical problems z— ethical bypassing. You’re so jazzed about your mission to save the world that you’re not noticing how much damage you’re doing.