When the culture espoused is different from the culture practiced,you've got trouble

My father worked for two companies in his entire career. And really, he made a fairly early switch, so 25 years of his career were spent with one company. Back in his generation, there wasn't the same level of fascination over corporate visions and mission statements.

My father's two jobs were in retail. He expressed his mission quite simply. Buy for 50 cents, sell for a dollar. Sell 6% more this year than last year. And yet somehow back then, there was far more loyalty and longevity. The Personnel Department became Human Resources.

Now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average post-baby boomer will hold 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44.  With the millennial workforce, the rate of job change is increasing even from that astonishing figure.

Coincidental with this sea change in work life, companies have gone crazy for mission statements, values, vision. I have worked at 9 companies in my career and in consulting I have been inside about a hundred more. Of those 9 companies, 5 no longer exist.

Many company vision statements are semi-meaningless platitudes. Almost every company I have ever been at has the same proclamation - "people are our most important asset." Other mission and vision statements are aspirations expressed as current conditions - "we make the highest quality products."

All of these attempts strike me as backwards. The culture at your company is what is being practiced, not what it is being advertised as. And if the culture that is practiced is different from the culture being espoused, your organization is locked into a deep dysfunction. Best case is you are congratulating yourselves for being something you are not, and therefore no longer moving in the right direction. Worst case, like 5 of 9 companies I have worked for, is that you go out of business.

Under Jack Welch, the culture at GE was Darwinian. But at least they told you that up-front. The culture there was the bottom 15% of performers would be canned, the top 15% would be heavily rewarded, and the middle of the pack would be in between the carrot and stick. People weren't their most important asset, but rather good people were.

There is a short story by Isaac Asimov where someone has created a semantic analyzer. Feed  in a document, and it would pop out with what the document really said. In a test of the device, a very lengthy government document was put in, and out came.... nothing. A blank sheet of paper.

So take out your corporate mission statement and semantically analyze it. Does it actually say anything? And if it does, does it represent the true values of the organization?

I am not suggesting you go all Glengarry Glen Ross in your organization. Neither should it be 1984. Don't delude yourself. Your corporate culture, like your own personality, is what it is. If you don't like it, you need to change it. Changing the words around it will do nothing but hurt. In the wise advice of Mother Goose, a man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.