We are working on our mission statement, values, and vision in my organization. One of the values the board wants is "collaboration". Our members don't like it because some of them have had experiences with physicians thinking "collaboration" means that nurses are their handmaidens.

So--rather than to argue, we need to come up with a better word. We want the word to mean working together with other professions/disciplines, sharing ideas. We may not agree with everything, but we will dialogue in a meaningful way.

Do any words come to mind? One term, "partnering" was considered, but it wasn't quite right since we're not really forming partnerships.

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"partnering" was considered, but it wasn't quite right

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I would agree. Besides, I've never been comfortable with the practice of verbizing nouns. (Or the equally common nouning of verbs.)

"Collaboration" has the right denotation, but its connotations can extend to cooperating with the enemy, and I trust you don't mean that either.

Working together, striving toward a common goal, blah blah, impress me as regrettably lofty, pompous platitudes, clichéd, commmittee-babble. Despite the fact that they are certainly desirable traits. I tend to groan when I see them: "Good grief, not again, pitch this one." Maybe mission statements have to sound like that. Too bad.

Have to work on it a bit more.

[This message was edited by haberdasher on Thu May 1st, 2003 at 6:36.]

Well, it looks like I won't find an answer to this one. The definition for this still-to-be-named-word is: "forging solutions through the collective strength of internal and external stakeholders." I think we may have to stick with "collaboration" for lack of a better word. And, I thought English had so many more words than other languages!

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Originally posted by haberdasher:
Besides, I've never been comfortable with the practice of verbizing nouns.

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Verbizing? Is that a verbized noun?

Tinman

As I have said previously, in English there are no nouns that cannot be verbed.

And, what's wrong with "cooperating" as a verb to describe working with others?

Richard English

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The definition for this still-to-be-named-word is: "forging solutions through the collective strength of internal and external stakeholders." I think we may have to stick with "collaboration" for lack of a better word. And, I thought English had so many more words than other languages

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And, what's wrong with "cooperating" as a verb to describe working with others?

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Two thoughts occur. One is that Kalleh is finding out first hand why mission statements are actually a bad idea rather than the good idea they might seem on the surface.
Generally speaking everyone in an organisation has a pretty good idea what the purpose of the organisation is until you try to write it down.
Then all of a sudden all sorts of things that have no business being there get thrown into the mix - politics, past grievances, semantics, egos, the desire to sound important and so on.

Here we are trying to find a word to match the definition

"forging solutions through the collective strength of internal and external stakeholders"

but the definition itself is flawed in that it's using self-important language in a way that by and large conveys nothing to the casual reader and a hundred conflicting things to the dedicated semanticist.

The second thing is that as soon as you start examining words to match this already dubious definition you can start find reasons to reject them.
To choose a few from the thesaurus.

collaborate - as has been pointed out may carry the implication of with the enemy.

cooperate - can be construed as implying against your will.

assist - carries the definite impression of senior and junior partners in an enterprise.

joint participation fails to address the degree of participation and permits someone to say "well I participated didn't I, I came to the meeting">

teamwork abrogates individual responsibility and thus removes individual accountability.

Whatever word is suggested - co-ordinated effort, concurrence, unity, responsiveness, work in concert, alliance, collusion etc. - will have its supporters and its opponents.

That's why mission statements always

a) take months to produce

and

b) end up saying nothing.

Thankfully they aren't as common over here.

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

I agree wholeheartedly with Bob. For the past few days I've been drawing up my job description and performance agreement -- a complete and utter nonsense.

If "collaborate" has negative implications in some people's eyes, what's wrong with "working together"?

Thanks for all your great replies.

Unfortunately, I am too low on the totem pole to be able to stand up to our Board of Directors and my Executive Director and say, "Let's not have a mission statement." Just won't work--and I may not have a job, were I to do that!

Bob you make good points about our definition sounding too self-important. Now I wish we would have spent more time & thought on it. However, you should see the others! I love (she says sarcastically!) the definition for "integrity": "doing the right thing for the right reason through informed open and ethical debate." Now, I strongly argued against this one (unsuccessfully) because who knows what is right? After all, could the Nazis have thought they were doing the right thing because they were obeying Hitler? Oy vey!

I agree that "working together" may be the best term. To me it is simple, not self-important nor presumptuous. Yet, haberdasher called it "a pompous, lofty platitude" so not everyone agrees with my perception! I think, for lack of a better word, we will live with "collaborate"--though our member boards were the ones who complained about that word and may lynch us at our annual meeting!

Why do I think that German may have the perfect word for us? Yes, Richard, I know that we have so many more words than they do. Yet, they seem to have these marvelously descriptive words that we don't have. Remember "katzenjammer", schadenfreude", "torschlusspanik", and "ohrwurm"? By the way, since our blasted double dactyl thread, I have definitely had "ohrwurms"!

(now there's an unfortunate subject line..)

>Why do I think that German may have the perfect word for us?

If you were working in German you could just build a new word from the component parts, in this case your mission statement. It would get to be quite long, just like a 'real' German word!

Let me save you a lot of time. Here's my guide to writing mission statements.

1. Choose one word from each of the lists below.
2. String them together into a phrase.
3. Write a sentence to go around them.
4. Repeat from step 1. until required word count achieved.

partner, customer, participant, client, support, goal, object, target, process, activity, achievement, attainment, performance, realisation, core

driven, centred, focused, organised, actuated, measured, constrained, motivated, actuated, concentrated, directed, codified, classified, moderated, bounded

methodology, activity, commitment, stratification, momentum, solution, planning, co-operation, commitment, approach, programme, system, structure, enterprise, venture

So...

We believe in partner directed commitment and a client motivated approach to enable our performance codified commitment. Because of this we will always take a core concentrated solution and by applying performance bounded programmes and target driven stratification we will achieve our goal classified methodology.

etc. etc.

Hope this helps.


Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

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"working together" may be the best term. To me it is simple, not self-important nor presumptuous. Yet, haberdasher called it "a pompous, lofty platitude"

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I plead guilty to imprecise expression. It's not working together per se that I was objecting to, it's just that Working Together contains so much "pious hope" (as does "Striving Toward a Common Goal") and I was taught to shun that in writing.

I think that good mission statements are an excellent idea. It's just unfortunate that most mission statements are rotten!

Now, if you were to write a mission statement in no more than a dozen words, then you stand some chance of creating something that people will remember and may even believe in.

Claude Johnson created, just one hundred years ago, what must have been one of the world's most famous mission statements, "...We want to build the best car in the world..." And the partners of the firm agreed. And Rolls-Royce has lived that belief ever since.

Hey, you want a mission statement - I'll write you one (and I start at a fiver for a one-hundred word job and the price goes up by a tenner for each word removed)

Richard English

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Verbizing? Is that a verbized noun?

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Durn tootin' it is. Double-verbized, at that. "Verbing" would have been sufficient; "verbizing" is meant to be redundant and therefore self-deprecating. I've always (well, since 1979, anyway) been fond of self-referential or self-contradictory sentences. "Hofstadters," I calls 'em.

[This message was edited by haberdasher on Fri May 2nd, 2003 at 13:27.]

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Originally posted by Richard English:
I think that good mission statements are an excellent idea. It's just unfortunate that most mission statements are rotten!

Claude Johnson created, ... one of the world's most famous mission statements, "...We want to build the best car in the world..."

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Sadly if that were written today it would run to five hundred pages and include such gibberish as "core engineering processes", "customer focussed design strategies", "optimised cost-productivity ratios", "maximised corporate visibility" and God knows what else.
The production of the first draft would have taken the entire senior management at least a year (probably with trips to other engineering companies in exotic locations to compare notes). This would then have been rejected and the task outsourced to a high powered agency who would replace it with a second draft of double the length written by a consultancy team of no less than six people at the requisite thousand pounds each per day working for a minimum of six months.

And at the end of it, with the new thousand page version in hand the receivers would be called in as the money spent on the mission statement would have force RR into the bankruptcy courts.

That's just life in the modern hectic world of business.

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

[This message was edited by BobHale on Fri May 2nd, 2003 at 15:28.]

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Originally posted by haberdasher:
I've always (well, since 1979, anyway) been fond of self-referential or self-contradictory sentences. "Hofstadters," I calls 'em.

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OK, I'll bite. Why?

Sorry. It wasn't meant to be a riddle.

Hofsadter ==> Gödel, Escher, Bach ==> a lot af consideration of self-referential things and processes and objects (like "This sentence no verb.")

A favorite of mine, GEB is full of puzzles and deep thoughts and music and art and computer stuff and other lovely things.

For a more detailed review read Martin Gardner's review in the "Mathematical Games" column of Scientific American, July 1979, five months after the book was published, which begins:

"Every few decades an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event. Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, a hefty (777 page) volume just published by Basic Books, is such a work. The author (and the illustrator and typesetter) is Douglas R Hofstadter, a young computer scientist at Indiana University who is the son of the well-known physicist Robert Hofstadter."

(Of course, that was 23 years ago, so he's not so young any more, but the book is still in print and available in bookstores. You can also find it in the library, under "Philosophy.")

It deserves the praise.

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Originally posted by haberdasher:

It deserves the praise.

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I'll vouch for that although for non-mathematicians it might be pretty heavy going in places. I'm a mathematician and I found some of it pretty heavy going.

Other books that people who like it might appreciate are

Descartes' Dream-The World According to Mathematics by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hirsch

The Mathematical Experience (same authors).

The Jungles of Randomness by Ivars Peterson (which may well open your eyes to our constant and casual abuse of statistics).


Actually this is starting to get spooky now. I'm losing my sense of reality as I become convinced that I'm turning into haberdasher's sock puppet. We just need to find out now that he's a major Alice In Wonderland fan and voted for it in the BBC's Big Read survey and I'll probably disappear like a Boojum.

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

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I'll vouch for that although for non-mathematicians it might be pretty heavy going in places. I'm a mathematician and I found some of it pretty heavy going.

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I think it's not so much a mathematical mind but more a rigorous logical one that is wanted. Or the willingness to adopt that bent for the duration, anyway.

I read the SciAm review when it first appeared and decided that while the subjects were generally within my interests, it would be hubris to think I could understand the book. A little like reading Ulysses. Then I decided What the heck, I'll try it, and what I understood I would understand, and what I didn't I wouldn't. So the library located a copy for me and I read it, and then I read it again, and then I decided any author who gave me that much pleasure deserved a more concrete token of my appreciation, and went out and bought it. Hard-cover. Haven't regretted it. It's become a rite of passage for my family: I gave my kids a each a copy when I thought they were able to understand it (well, make sense out of it, anyway).

And no, I still don't understand all of it either, but still I find it's lots of fun to read!

(Long-winded. Apologies for that. I'm mostly trying to reassure any non-mathematicians out there that it wouldn't be automatically beyond them. It has the dubious distinction of being called "the most esoteric book ever to top the NY Times best-seller list" and it got the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction that year.)

[This message was edited by haberdasher on Sat May 3rd, 2003 at 6:47.]

I'd echo everything that's been said here about Hofstadter's Epic Tome. He even coined (at least) two worthless words: autological and heterological. <g>

Tsuwm, always good to hear from you, our in-house celebrity!

Gone for a day and now this thread has gotten away from me! Tsuwm's comment about the Germans building words from component parts gave me the idea to contact that German Web site again to see if the Germans do have a word that meets our needs. Those of you who have been here awhile probably remember when I did that, looking for a word to mean "talking to oneself". The Webmaster on that site came up with Selbstgesprache fuhren, if you recall, meaning, "to lead in self conversations".

And, Richard, if I knew how much a "fiver" or a "tenner" were worth, I'd consider hiring you!

quote:

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Originally posted by Richard English:
I think that good mission statements are an excellent idea.

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I agree with Richard that a mission statement is a good idea. All individuals and organizations have a goal in life, and this goal can be articulated through a concise statement, a mission statement. It should be one sentence if possible. It should not be a blueprint. How the organization intends to accomplish its mission should be spelled out in other documents, NOT in the mission statement.

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"...We want to build the best car in the world..."

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Richard's example here is a good one. It states the company's reason for being in ten words. TheSaturn Division of GM has a mission statement that says essentially the same thing. but takes thirty-seven words to do it. Eastman Kodak's mission statement (on the same site) is better.

The mission statement of the Washington Native Plant Society (WNPS) is " ... to promote the appreciation and conservation of Washington's native plants and their habitats through study, education, and advocacy".

The Internet Nonprofit Center quotes Ron Meshanko of Ecumenical Resource Consultants, Inc.:

"A Mission Statement should be a one-sentence, clear, concise statement that says who the agency is (the name, that it is a nonprofit, and what type of agency it is), what it does, for whom and where. Period."

and

"Finally, the importance of mission statements is summarized quite eloquently by Lewis Caroll through the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, 'If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which way you go.' Indeed!

(Copyright ©1994-95 Support Center, 706 Mission Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, CA, USA 94103-3113. 415-974-5100.)

Tinman

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Richard, if I knew how much a "fiver" or a "tenner" were worth, I'd consider hiring you!

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A fiver is five UK pounds and a tenner is, unsurprisingly, ten pounds.

Very roughly, a fiver is worth eight US dollars, and a tenner sixteen.

quote:

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Originally posted by tinman:
Finally, the importance of mission statements is summarized quite eloquently by Lewis Caroll through the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, 'If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which way you go.' Indeed!

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A substantial paraphrase !

The cat replies "Then it doesn't much matter which way you go,"

in reply to Alice's assertion that she doesn't much care where she is going.

In context I'd have called a pretty eloquent summing up of the unimportance of mission statements.

(That said, I'll accept that a mission statement of one sentence of twenty words or less is possibly a good idea if you will accept the near impossibility of convincing most senior management that this is a mission statement at all.)

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

And, now, the German word for "collaboration" from the German site I posted in Links for Linguaphiles....here is his response:

That would be Zusammenarbeit (literally "working together") or Mitarbeit
("working with (one another)"). Of course collaboration also is literally
"working with (one another)".

Zusammenarbeit comes closer to the meaning I think. Both German words can
mean physical work, but also the sense of collaboration or cooperation.
Niether has a negative connotation.

The verb would be zusammenarbeiten or mitarbeiten.

German speakers will also use the English "Teamwork".

Do you think our members would embrace "zusammenarbeiten"?

[This message was edited by Kalleh on Sun May 4th, 2003 at 8:01.]

But look carefully at the deal! I don't work like other management consultants who charge by the length of what they write; I charge by the brevity.

Any fool can write a hundred-word mission statement; it takes a special writer to write a ten-word one. Claude Johnson was just one such writer.

Richard English

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Originally posted by BobHale:

quote:

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Originally posted by tinman:
Finally, the importance of mission statements is summarized quite eloquently by Lewis Caroll through the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, 'If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which way you go.' Indeed!

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A substantial paraphrase !

The cat replies "Then it doesn't much matter which way you go,"

in reply to Alice's assertion that she doesn't much care where she is going.

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You're right, Bob! I should have looked it up. Replacing know with care would make it an accurate paraphrase, but change the whole meaning of what Meshanko was trying to say. Sorry for the sacrilege.

Tinman

About 4 years ago, I was volunteered to help rewrite our agency's mission statement. ARGGGGGGG....it took months of meetings but we finally finished it. We were all so proud of the result and the many hours we put into it.

Two years ago, we moved into new offices and they had the mission statement etched into glass and hung on the conference room wall. Imagine our surprise upon reading it, when we discovered it was nothing like the one written by my task group just two years prior! It seams, someone didn't like what we spent months creating, so they changed it!

You certainly can't please everyone!

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
..."forging solutions through the collective strength of internal and external stakeholders." I think we may have to stick with "collaboration" for lack of a better word...

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Plus, you don't want to risk offending the vegetarians.