Dr. Richard Rumelt argues that mission and vision statements cannot produce strategy. He uses Nokia's collapse after 2011 as an example: despite grand statements about empowering people, the company clung to Symbian while Apple and Samsung moved to software-first platforms. Nokia's 100 product managers chased quarterly sales targets instead of building coherent strategy.
It comes from the statements doctrine. Statements doctrine is that, oh, what you should do is you should write a mission statement, and then you should write a vision statement, and then you should write a value statement, and then you should write a goal statement, and then an objective statement, and finally a strategy statement. And, you know, the governments of the world tend to employ lots of people writing piles and piles of these statements. And it doesn't work. You can't deduce a strategy from a mission. It's not a deductive process. It can't be done. Here's Nokia's millions of units being sold. Nokia at one time, of course, was the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, and it was up until 2011 the leading producer of cell phones, and it even came out with a smartphone somewhere here around 2011. But why does Nokia collapse here? And you can say, well, it's Apple. Well, Samsung didn't collapse. Samsung took off. Nokia's mission at that moment in time was to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And their vision was to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. Now, does that help deal with the fact, not so much of Apple, what was really going on is the technology was changing from hardware to software. That Nokia had been a master at making chips into little tiny boards and putting them in phones and and they had an operating system called Symbian that they had to re-engineer every time they changed the chip. And that tied up older engineers constantly with this stuff. They knew Apple was making the iPhone. They knew it. They had spies inside Apple. And the CEO of Nokia at every single meeting said, "I— we need a touch— finger touch phone. We need something like what Apple's coming out." But it never got produced. It never got produced because they didn't have a strategy. They had management by objectives. They had 100 different product managers, each being held to quarterly results on sales and earnings. Jobs came along and changed the industry. But the writing was on the wall about software versus hardware.
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