This was the title of a recent article in the Economist. (The link is behind a paywall*). The general idea is that corporate mission statements are all the same, and are totally not credible. A company’s mission and values is communicated by how it behaves, not what it says on the web site.
What does it mean for presentations? Putting your company’s mission statement on page 1 is unlikely to get your audience to move to the edges of their seats.
- I actually tried licensing the content, which took me through an interesting process. “Do you want print as well?”. “Please list all the countries where you want to use it” (Worldwide was not an option in the drop down). “How many months?”. And in the dropdown menu of “who are you?”, the blogger did not show up. In the end The Economist suggested GBP 500 for linking to an article for just one month that might have gotten them more subscribers.
Cover image by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash