The Constitutional Documents Issue

• Since a mission statement is mostly about what other people say, and aligning it on a singular phrase, make it something you and your team would be proud to say over dinner or in a meeting. 
• Another company may have your same mission (in fact, there may very well be an incumbent that does). It’s how your team makes progress towards it that will really set you apart. (See: Operating Principles).
• There’s a fine line between ambition and hubris. Bias towards ambition by taking a clear-eyed look at what’s possible if your company was wildly successful. Steer clear of hubris by taking a clear-eyed look about the reach and impact your company can actually have.

Mission statements of great organizations:

• Hallmark: create a more emotionally connected world
• Nike: bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete
• Microsoft (in 1980): a computer on every desk in every home
• Google: “To organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful.”
• SpaceX wants to make humanity multiplanetary. From their website: “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” – Elon Musk
• Patagonia is “in business to save our home planet”  From their website: “Patagonia grew out of a small company that made tools for climbers. Alpinism remains at the heart of a worldwide business that still makes clothes for climbing—as well as for skiing, snowboarding, surfing, fly fishing, mountain biking and trail running…. As the climate crisis deepens, we see a potential, even probable end to such moments, and so we’re fighting to save them. We donate our time, services and at least 1% of our sales to help hundreds of grassroots organizations all over the world so that they can protect what’s irreplaceable.”

• The best vision statements are often personal and include some explanation of why you decided there was nothing else in the world that you should do except for solve the problems your company is solving, and how you hope the world changes as a result of solving those problems. 
• Go on and get a little dewey-eyed with ambition as you put pen to paper on this one. Get comfortable with writing something someone might roll their eyes at. Remember, you likely started your company because you know something someone else doesn’t.

• Primer’s Vision Statement strikes the balance between personal storytelling and clarity of greater purpose, a clear-eyed take on today’s reality and painting a picture of a better reality, the warm-and-fuzzies and the cold hard facts, ambition and humility.  “Kids are remarkable — and our current system is underestimating them,” it declares with confidence. It’s hard to imagine not  being roused into action after reading something like that!
• Our World In Data “publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.” Their Vision Statement tackles the intrinsic link between understanding progress (which includes understanding problems) and making progress. “Personally I believe that if we are in a situation in which it is possible to make progress then we are obliged to seek progress. But even if you do not see it as an obligation, you can also see it as an opportunity, a chance to help others, the possibility to do useful work in your life.”
• Tesla’s Plans (Master Plan, and Master Plan Part Deux) are iconic examples of product strategy, company vision, personality, and ambitious thinking rolled into one.
• Dwell’s Fruitbowl Manifesto clarifies how they want to be a different kind of aspirational: “At Dwell, we’re staging a minor revolution. We think that it’s possible to live in a house or apartment by a bold modern architect, to own furniture and products that are exceptionally well designed, and still be a regular human being. We think that good design is an integral part of real life. And that real life is the thing that has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines.”

• Good operating principles are both reflective and aspirational. They express how everyone agrees they want to work on their best days, and help get things back on track on the hard days. 
• Having a shared language for your operating principles is what’s going to make them useful in the run of work when it really counts and helps all of your team members connect over them. It should be unusual to get through a day without hearing one used. 
• Every phrase should easily roll off the tongue. When writing yours, role play the scenarios in which you hope someone would use a phrase to identify someone doing great work or to course-correct something that’s going off-track.

• Google’s original “Ten Things We Know to Be True” is a manifesto about the beliefs everyone should share, and how to work with them in mind.
• Netflix’s famous ‘culture deck’ intermingles their operating principles with other employee expectations and company norms. It made ripples for being so explicit about its expectations for employee behavior and performance. 
• At Stripe, new hires sign the company values. Here’s what they publish externally about the company culture and what anyone joining the company to expect it to feel like.
• At VMware, partnerships are encouraged to fall 51%/49% in favor of the partner.  
• Twilio has a ‘No Shenanigans’ operating principle (among others) which translates to “be thoughtful. always deal in an honest, direct, and transparent way.” It’s a friendly and breezy way to say what might otherwise be a hard thing.
• a16z publishes the same values to their public site as they do to their internal team.
• The Chatham House Rule states “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” It was created in 1927 to encourage openness in debates on controversial topics. 
• IDEO created the “Little Book of IDEO” to “to attempt to address some of the eternal questions that we are asked.”
• Teamflow’s operating principles state “We recognize that they aren’t for everyone. That’s fine. We don’t mean that this is the only way people should work. It’s just our way — and we totally understand and respect people who decide it’s not for them.”
• Amazon: 1/ Customer Obsession 2/ Ownership 3/ Invent and Simplify 4/Are Right, A Lot 5/ Hire and Develop the Best 6/ Insist on High Standards 7/ Think Big 8/ Bias Towards Action 9/ Frugality 10/ Earn Trust of Others 11/ Dive Deep 12/ Have Backbone: Disagree and Commit 13/ Deliver Results
• Uber (early days, modeled after Amazon): 1/ Always Be Hustlin’ 2/ Be An Owner, Not A Renter 3/ Big Bold Bets 4/ Celebrate Cities 5/ Customer Obsession 6/ Inside Out 7/ Let Builders Build 8/ Make Magic 9/ Meritocracy & Toe-Stepping 10/ Optimistic Leadership 11/ Super Pumped 12/ Champions Mindset/Winning
• Uber (after CEO transition): 1/ We build globally, we live locally 2/ We are customer obsessed 3/ We celebrate differences 4/ We do the right thing 5/ We act like owners 6/ We persevere 7/ We value ideas over hierarchy 8/ We make big bold bets
• The Montessori Education Principles: do an outstanding job of outlining what’s unique about their approach while also explaining how and why they arrived at it.
• The Gimbal is a guide to X’s moonshot factory culture. It combines stunning photography that shows the scale/craft of their work with a crisp articulation of values and navigational tips for “figur(ing) out what to try when you’re not sure what to do.”

• Getting your team to embrace these is just as important as getting the content right. If your team doesn’t fully wrap their arms around these and use them while the work is happening, they are ultimately not that useful.
• Invite your very early team members to comment on and edit the operating principles. 
• Spotlight stories of people upholding them in spectacular ways or doing something hard or inconvenient in service of them by adding them to your operating principles document. It should be an honor to have your work included there. 
• Do an onboarding session with new employees that encourages discussion on what each principle means to them. Ask what feels surprising or hard to imagine upholding. It can be a powerful force for discovering work style preferences and any lingering scar tissue from other companies. 
• Operating principles must be modeled by company leaders. Over time, no matter what, the inner voice of employees will start to match the outer voice of their leaders. They can also be coupled with norms like a McKinsey-style “obligation to dissent,” or Netflix’s courage value that explicitly asks employees to “question actions inconsistent with [their] values.”

“If you aren’t having these explicit conversations about what your culture is, the downsides are threefold: You don’t have the right people joining you, and you’re being unfair to those who do join you, in the sense that they end up being surprised by this emergent friction and tension in work styles. Thirdly, and I think this may be the non-obvious one, people’s disposition with regard to the company is actually a function of what they feel like they signed up for. If they feel like they signed up for an all-encompassing project, they’ll be much more willing to treat it that way than if they discovered it by surprise later on. And so you can actually change the outcome simply by being explicit at the outset.“

-Patrick Collison, founder and CEO of Stripe 

The full interview about what’s so important about setting expectations about how the work gets done is worth a read.