triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Mission Missioff The Missier

Whenever we shop at one of the Goodwill stores in our area, we are told, as we check out, "Thank you for supporting the Goodwill mission." Being the buttbutt boy that I am, I always respond that I'm not supporting the mission, I'm just shopping someplace cheap. Even when we donate items, our purpose is merely to see that items surplus to the smaller house we are moving to get reused. I don't believe anyone other than active duty military and Spanish monks in California need to have missions.

Professor Bainbridge appears to agree with me, but he still provides a link to a blog which is a collection of corporate mission statements. I've read a few, and all they are is "We will do our best to do what we are in business to do" loaded up with enough buzzwords as to turn them into parradiggums.

The reason this mission thing has gotten so popular can be explained by referencing a comment to this post. Fewer and fewer of us work with actual things. The alloy steel bars I dealt with when I was an industrial blacksmith didn't care what my mission was. All that mattered was that they were heated to the appropriate temperature for a sufficient time and and then acted upon forcefully enough in the required manner. When you are dealing with nothing but ephemerals, it is less obvious what really makes a difference and what is gobbledygook.