Say It and Live It: The 50 Corporate Mission Statements that Hit the Mark

by Patricia Jones, Larry Kahaner

Say It And Live It is the first collection of provocative, passionate, and intelligent corporate mission statements -- the most powerful and popular managerial tool in business today. A corporate mission statement is the most dramatic presentation of a company's vision and its goal. No other document -- annual report, press release, news article, statement from the board of directors -- tells us more about a company's values and ethics than a mission statement. Companies know that if they write it down, they will have to live up to it -- so they devote months, even years, the energy of people from the CEO on down, and significant sums of money to crafting them. Say It And Live It is the only source of information for the many business people who are presently writing their own mission statements. In it, authors Patricia Jones and Larry Kahaner show that industry leaders are frequently corporations that truly live their mission statements. Some of the winners Avis, Ben & Jerry's, Boeing, Citicorp, General Electric, Gillette, Hallmark Cards, IBM, Kellogg's, Reader's Digest, Saturn, Southwest Airlines, UPS, and Xerox. Say It And Live It is a collection of the fifty best corporate mission statements in America. Each entry consists of the company's complete mission statement, along with an explanation of how it was written, a lesson about how that mission statement saved the company or motivated employees, or comments from the CEO or the president. The introduction points out the common elements of these philosophical documents, while the final chapter is a list of tips on how you can write your own mission statement.

284 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1995

About the author

Also known as P.A. Jones