Bad mission/vision statements

[cch]

I personally hate seeing mission statements and vision statements that state the obvious, could be applied anywhere, or generally just don't say anything. But at my husband's job they've got a real doozy. The boss ask an employee to put together a mission statement for the department (a municipal water department), and the employee had fun with it and turned in something as a joke, expecting the boss to laugh and ask for a serious one. But no... no one knows if the boss didn't read it or if he honestly thought it was good, but later in the day it was framed and hanging on an office wall near the entrance. I can't even believe this is real, but here it is:

"It is our mission to dramatically initiate performance based opportunities as well as to proactively leverage existing quality leadership skills to meet our customer's needs."

Please share some of the more ridiculous mission and vision statements you've come across. They should be good for a friday morning laugh.

[jmac]

Many companies and agencies seem to have outsourced their mission statement development to Dilbert's Mission Statement Generation Services, Inc.

It is our business to enthusiastically leverage other's world-class resources so that we may efficiently negotiate prospective paradigms to stay competitive in tomorrow's world

Right on.

[Cardinal]

In the military I learned to write a mission statement that said who, what, when, where, and why. Good, clean, and simple. Of course, I have not always worked in places that saw things that way. I did like the mission statement of my own business: "We provide quality planning and economic development services to rural places and small cities nationwide, and stop often to play with the dogs."