Happy new year, 2018!

I am Hideyuki Fujiki who is a managing director of ZEN English. I have just started my English blog althought I have been writing my blog in Japanese for so many years. Today, I will introduce the reason why missons for companies are important.

Recently, you can see a lot of mission statements for the big companies such as Starbucks, J&J and 3M. For example, the mission statement of Starbucks is “Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”  Yes, we can see “one cup” there and we will make sense about what their mission for Starbucks is. However, I have a big question about why some companies fail even if they have good missons.

The biggest reason that some fail is about failuire of imprement. A good or bad example of that is Enron which had a mission statement that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity. As you know, Enron was bankrupt because of frauds(financial statement). If we do not imprement our missions, they would be nothing for us.

 On the other hand some companies hurt their performance by their missions. There is an instant that an ice cream company missed an opportunity to make their business bigger because they had a strong commitment for their employment that the highest-paid firm employee could earn no more than five times the income of the lowest-paid firm employee. In this case, the company could not catch up with other competitors which expanded rapidly in order to meet customer’s demand.

 In concludion, we should share our missions not only to management but also to employees. When we face some difficulties to impremend our mission, it would be the time to adjust it. Some missions improve their performance but others hurt them.

Corporate Philisophies(Missions)

Hard working
Customer’s perspective
Kaizen