Twitter’s New Message: Not Received

Ever hear two execs disagree about a company’s raison d’etre? I have—and it’s not pretty. It raises red flags every time. How can an organization accomplish its goals when its key people aren’t on the same page?

The short answer is that it can’t.

Along these lines, did you happen to see Twitter’s new “strategy statement”?

Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.

Huh?

People aren’t reacting well to it, and why should they? It’s utter nonsense and, ironically, a full 80 characters over Twitter’s tweet maximum. Some of the tweets are pretty clever:

Twitter's new mission statement: 35 words, 62 syllables, 4 clauses, 2 grammatical errors. pic.twitter.com/QhUgqE3zZ2

— Dennis K. Berman (@dkberman) November 12, 2014

Some have pointed out that a “strategy statement” (whatever that is) should never be confused with a mission statement. It’s a weak argument and I couldn’t disagree more. One statement needs to be clear while it’s acceptable for the other to be riddled with jargon? How does that work?

You can tell quite a bit about a company’s culture from how it attempts to define itself.

Lamentably, this type of gobbledygook is par for the course at the social network. Twitter is a very powerful and important company despite itself. Its culture is riddled with problems. Read Nick Bilton’s excellent book and you start to get a sense of how screwed up Twitter is. (My review is here.)

Simon Says

As I point out in Message Not Received, you can tell quite a bit about a company’s culture from how it attempts to define itself. If you can’t communicate clearly to the outside world, what are the odds that you’re doing a good job inside your organization’s walls?

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