This blog post is the second part of the “Avoiding Complexities & Attaining Simplicity” blog series. You can read the first part here.

Continuing from the first blog post – if you look at all the great companies around today, you will see all of them have a central mission that clearly defines them.

Take a look at Amazon, when they brought e-commerce to the masses their message was clear – you are able to purchase or sell anything with just a click of a button. And with that, “one click away” became Amazon’s company mission.

Not all companies have a clear mission. If you were to ask anyone about Apple during the period when Steve Jobs was in exile, people would tell different things about the company. Great companies have strong philosophies spread across their business with clear sight.

So the question is – what is a clear company mission and how do we go about developing one?

A company mission is simple yet a powerful affirmation addressing the fundamentals, “what, how and why” a company do what it does. This allows the company to get rid of all the noise and strike out things that are not aligned with its mission.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple from his long exile, the company was all over the place and within a short span of time, he brought back the energy and mojo of the company which to this day.

Few companies have a mission as sharp as Apple’s. But, before taking back control of the company, Steve Jobs formulated a new company mission and presented it to everyone. These were the words showcased in the slides which he presented – “Mission: provide relevant, compelling solutions that customers can only get from Apple.”

Without Steve Jobs having a sharp vision and giving the company a clear sight, Apple could have been just another PC manufacturer in the market. Instead, its revolutionary products are well-liked by consumers all over.

In the first blog post, I mentioned taking a stroll into an Apple store and how it left an amazing impression on me. The Apple Store has been an opportunity for the company to demonstrate its mission in the public domain – from how the employees act to the way its stores look.

When Ron Johnson was recruited to set up the Apple store, he kept Steve Jobs mission as the focal point. Just as Apple’s products were created to provide compelling solutions, Apple stores central mission was to enrich the lives of each person that walked through the store’s doors. This is why I was impressed with their customer-centric approach.

To sum up this blog post, every company needs a simple and powerful mission to become great.

In the future post of this series, I will be diving deeper into the company culture, having the right CEO, the right team and much more.

Till then, thanks for reading,