Can you identify the company that is represented by the following mission statement?
Many people know this company well. Here is its mission – minus its name and primary product:
“_________________Incorporated provides its customers quality ____________ products and the expertise required for making informed buying decisions. We provide our products and services with a dedication to the highest degree of integrity and quality of customer satisfaction, developing long-term professional relationships with employees that develop pride, creating a stable working environment and company spirit.”
Feeling inspired? Is this a place where you’d like to work? Have you guessed its identity?
That’s the mission statement of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.
That would be the fictional workplace of NBC’s classic sitcom The Office, now enjoying daily resurrections via reruns.
The mission statement, of course, is a joke. According to the series storyline, Dunder Mifflin is incurably dysfunctional. It’s actually rather funny that the comedy writers played it straight and composed a mission statement that reads like so many of the thousands of real-life statements that purport to guide workplaces all over the world.
Fans of The Office can only laugh in painful recognition.
“Yeah, we’ve got a mission statement just like that,” say more than a few American workers. “It’s framed and hangs in the elevator and is routinely ignored by leadership and rank and file alike.”
Mission statements are cheap. But living missionally is costly.
One corporation that’s endeavored to practice what it preaches is Nordstrom, the retail giant that has a reputation for extraordinary customer service.
For years, the Nordstrom Employee Handbook was just a five-inch by seven-inch card. Here’s what was printed on the back: Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1. Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules. Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.
That was it.
Nordstrom decided to trust its associates. And those employees have consistently thrived in an environment where they have been free to use their own best judgment.
One shopper liked a particular sweater. “But I think I just saw it at another store for $10 less,” she sighed. “That’s OK,” said a Nordstrom associate. “You wait here and I’ll go buy it for you.” While the customer drank a cup of coffee, the salesperson drove to the other store and bought the sweater. Then she put it into a Nordstrom bag and sold it to the customer for the lower price.
One of Nordstrom’s goals is to create “a memorable experience” for those they serve. That was a memorable experience.
A pastor I know trudged into Nordstrom feeling uneasy. He was wearing a blue blazer he had bought there a year earlier. But the blazer had never really been a good fit. And now it had some wear and tear and not a few pieces of lint.
“No problem,” said the Nordstrom employee. “We have an unconditional money back guarantee. Please pick out another blazer.” I don’t remember exactly what he said to the store associate. But I do recall that he later concluded, “I sure wish the church treated me more like Nordstrom!”
Nordstrom’s vision is to become “a place where service is an act of faith.”
Management has proclaimed that too many rules, protocols, and over-regulated channels of communication tend to erode employee incentive. Or as one observer puts it, “Because they don’t have many rules, you don’t worry about whether you are breaking any.”
This is grace. Not law. Service. Not obligation.
Make no mistake: Nordstrom’s leadership is not starry-eyed. One leader admits, “It was never that we were so great, it was just that everyone else was so bad. We know that at this moment, someone, somewhere is getting bad service at Nordstrom.”
But the company has gambled that if a service culture is put into place, and rigorously reinforced, great service will happen more often than not.
Wouldn’t it be great to be part of a cause that has an awesome mission statement (which it actually takes seriously) and empowers its members to use their “best judgment in all situations”?
Welcome to the Jesus Movement.
The mission, which can be gleaned from a variety of New Testament texts, is simple and powerful: To know Christ and make him known. Our call is to be lifelong learners of everything Jesus said and did, and to invite others to do the same.
Are there rules? Just two of them, in the end: Love God and love others.
This world-changing mission is to be reinforced on a daily and weekly basis in hundreds of thousands of local “outlets” called churches, where Christ-followers are to be reminded that they are loved, forgiven, called, equipped, and empowered by God’s indwelling Spirit to serve the world as the hands and feet of Jesus.
I know, I know.
That probably doesn’t sound very much like your church. All too many congregations have succumbed to the temptation to burden their members with countless rules for serving God “the right way” – some of them written, many of them not. It’s a guarantee that at this very moment someone, somewhere, is being mistreated, misled, or misunderstood by a spiritual leader.
But that doesn’t change our mission statement – God’s call to be disciples who make more disciples.
Yes, most church members wish they were treated a lot more like Nordstrom. It’s easy to rattle off mission statements. It’s infinitely harder to actually live the mission.
But buoyed by Jesus’ own promise that he will always be with us (Matthew 28:19-20), we can do it.
Even if we look up at church one Sunday and discover that Steve Carrell is the guest preacher.
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