Why do normal guys need a company mission - and a little cybernetics

“Mission” is usually sold by companies in an advertising agency along with a still warm brand book. Well, that is, if it was really a brand book, and not a manual on how you can not draw a logo on fences. The mission is included in the ritual of exchanging the grandmother of the founder for someone else's market.

Further on the mission, a bolt is driven in and they work as before. More precisely, PR specialists sometimes remember about it and tell about charity after press releases. I saw only a few honest missions, in one of the large companies the third item even went “investor enrichment".

But, nevertheless, if you use distributed control, this most incomprehensible garbage is vital for you.

Why is she so beautiful?

In Russia - most likely, that was, because it is not allowed for a large company to live without a mission. There are exceptions, of course. In other countries, people are much more likely to create a business not for the sake of a heap of money, a jeep and a box of vodka, but to change something. In this case, the mission describes the ultimate goal or the main way to achieve it.

Grandfather Kotler once wrote that if you combine phrases in any order about the importance of people, become the best in your field and organize world peace, you get a completely suitable mission for the corporation. For anyone.

So, in classical theory, a mission is a description of the meaning of a company’s existence and a means of motivating personnel. The question is how many graduates in the specialty “marketing” will be able to translate this into simple Russian and give a simple Russian example.

Dispersion control

We put off the mission for a moment and move on to cybernetics - the science of control.

With small sizes, the hierarchical management network with the root decision center copes well. With the growth of the company at the level of the far node, it is not always possible to take and clarify from the head why we are digging there at all. If you run with each decision from the point of application to the top (the point of final decision), then immediately comes stack overflow, collapse and hell.

Therefore, from some point on, you need decision centers at levels below. Direct links are introduced in parallel (the closest analogy is the work of the reflex arc instead of a conscious reaction through the brain), but this is somewhat beyond the scope of the topic.

So, in your structure there are people who must make decisions based on their asshole. In general, if they are “their own on the board”, everyone understands everything already. But this, of course, is not always the case.

So, you need a tool so that a person can verify how correct his decision (made independently without any advice above) is correct. Need a tool. This is mission plus values.

Good missions

Good missions are easy to verify. Set yourself any task, and see which of the solution options is most appropriate.

For example, if you have a choice:

• Get ahead of the competitor and release a non-tested piece of iron
• It is possible to lose in profit, and bring the test to the end.

The option may not be very obvious. Moreover, if you are from Cisco - the mission is about the fact that the company creates reliable networks. With fluctuations, there is something to turn to. We check (1) - does not match. We check (2) - it matches. Decision is made.

Or just imagine that you work at Amazon, and you need to make a decision in 5 minutes whether to put a new strange product on sale. And these are absolutely incomprehensible gift certificates for CTF quests for information security. I want to refuse, but the mission had something about a space where everyone can buy whatever they want. Probably worth trying to sell them, right?

Guess whose?

And how is it in the harsh reality with us?

We ourselves have not yet bothered with these elaborate formulations, but we definitely know two things:

• Mosigra is: 1) positive, 2) profit
• Magellan (our production) is the best board game in the world.

I must say about Magellan. Given that the surrounding reality is a rather complicated thing, declaring in a mission about the best games in the world and doing them in practice are two big differences. And much. But you have to try.

When we release a new circulation of a game, as a rule, it is almost always improved: somewhere, feedback on reviews helps, somewhere - stories of players on social networks, somewhere - analysis of marriage, sometimes - stories of animators, and so on. If squinting - this happens - we try to fix it. Just the other day (according to the law of meanness - right after the topic about marriage), Magellan passed the game "Agents" with slightly different shirts of mission cards in color. How did the control go? The riddle, most likely, the marriage did not concern the whole party. In general, we managed to sell 20 pieces until we wrote darthsliderindicating the problem. With whom they could - contacted. We collected the entire circulation from the stores and sent them for alteration. On the other hand, if in that case a typo game would come to the stores, the print run would not be returned, but would be corrected in the following.

Or, recently, there were two points with the localization of the game: on the final box, there is incorrect kerning in one of the inscriptions (not the name), plus the slogan of the publisher in English. It would seem, what for do we touch kerning, if it does not affect sales? A box must be printed tomorrow, the machine is already idle, stores are waiting. So no, we took it out of the process, corrected and prepared again. And the slogan was translated, but not just translated, but translated in several versions - and again into English, so that the authors choose the most correct shade of meaning.

All this, if it adds the commercial value of the game, is not comparable with the time spent. But this is an approach - if you can, do it well. I saw this in the craft workshops of Samarkand: there, the master simply cannot give away a bad or ugly thing - he will be banally ashamed. Because there was a caste system of professions, and when you become a master, you make a concrete promise to your ancestors. Contract, if you like. And for us to do this is just a human buzz.

And also the manufacturers pick equipment and go through whole engineering quests to improve it. By the way, one of the most important technical problems in 2012 was solved by an engineer of the old Soviet school, who, using a soldering iron, pliers and some kind of mother, assembled a device worth a couple of million in the Western market.

Tips

Values ​​and mission give clues on what and how to do. For example, an insoluble problem - what should be on outdoor advertising, which layout to choose. What are we doing? Right, back to the mission again. If we had it in the wording as above, then, as you see, she clearly would not have enough specifics in what exactly is positive. It seems like not mass shootings, but still a few more advertising options remain. Values ​​are mission detailing (roughly speaking). They report exactly what to focus on.

So, mission is a decision verification tool. If the decision brings us closer to the fulfillment of the mission - it is correct. If moves away - wrong.

And you can also build a mission according to the company's actions, doing a kind of reverse engineering.Try it, it's interesting. Often at the time of understanding this fact comes another terrifying understanding that, in general, most businesses have no other purpose than to make money by any means available in the shortest possible time.