Michael Campion: Mission is a critical part of purpose. Talk to me about that.Speaker 2: 0:03

Bob Sheard: Yeah, mission is very, very, very intimately related to vision. Vision is what we're aiming for. Mission is what we do every day to get there. The mission really is important because it's the action that a brand does every day to achieve its vision, and what's critical about the mission is it tends to emotionalize culture within a brand. So when we created Odlo, we created the brand based on the craftsman archetype, which meant that what we had to do was build a culture of craftsmen.

Michael Campion: Sorry, can you tell me what Odlo is, for the benefit of the audience?

Bob Sheard: Odlo is based near Zurich. It's a Swiss base layer brand, part Norwegian heritage, part Swiss heritage. The outdoors sensibility to nature comes from its Norwegian heritage but that's anchored in Swiss engineering and they make phenomenal base layers for outdoor mountain sports. And we positioned them as the craftsman brand, which meant we had to create a culture of craftsmen and, as part of that culture, to emotionalize that culture. We gave them a mission, which was 'that every day, everyone in that business woke up and looked at every day as if it was a gift given to them to create a masterpiece with'. So the mission was to 'every day, create a masterpiece', and that's what drove a culture of craftsmanship within the organization.

Another similar brand which we've talked about a bit was Arc'teryx. At Arc'teryx, what we did there in terms of the mission was what they did sorry at the very beginning is they created a very simple mission and that mission was to kill the Patagonia Torade jacket. So Jeremy Gard put the jacket on the table and said "our mission is to kill that jacket. It's the best selling jacket in the market and it's not good enough and I don't care how we do it or what we do, we're going to kill it and through the process of killing it. They built a $1 billion apparel company but ultimately they killed the jacket. But in some of the best attributes of competition is it also made their competitors stronger. So they all became stronger because they competed against each other. But that created a behaviour of innovation and they realized that innovation wasn't an objective. At Arc'teryx they realized that innovation was a behaviour and that behaviour was inspired by the very simple mission which was to kill the Patagonia Torade jacket.

I suppose the most famous exposition of mission is JFK, which is to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, not because it's easy but because it is hard. And in that very simple mission he was able to galvanize all the complexities of that mission, whether it was fuel science, engineering science, rocket science, aeronautics, physics. He was able to galvanize all the main academic institutions. MIT put them together with all the main commercial institutions, such as Boeing, where there was the commercial interests and the academic interests combined to do their bit, which might be the rocket propulsion, or it might be fuel, or it might be the design of the astronaut suits. Whatever it was, they all created, took very complex structures and they galvanized them around a very simple objective - put a man on the moon.

The very famous story is that when JFK went around the NASA Space Center and a couple of years later and he'd met everybody, and then there was a guy sweeping out the hanger cleaner and he went to the cleaner. He said "what do you do here? He said hi, Mr President, I'm here to put a man on the moon. And so he just showed you how that very simple, beautiful objective could galvanize everybody's talents, everybody's expertise to make the complex work and serve. The simple and the simple thing was to put a man on the moon. So mission's really important in terms of driving culture.

Michael Campion: Yeah. So what I'm hearing there is that, when it comes to mission, this is just as much about getting internal buy-in and a contagious sense of mission from within, isn't it as much as it is about any external contagion? What is the actions every day, the day-to-day actions every day, internally, they radiate and emanate outwards. Is that right? Am I getting that correct?

Bob Sheard: Yeah, and the really important thing is kind of start to channel Napoleon Bonaparte when you craft your mission, so what Napoleon said was that "the truth is the lies we all believe'. So actually, when you're searching for a mission to galvanize your team, you're searching for a truth that they can all believe in. What you're giving them is a 'why'. Everybody has a 'what'. Their what is getting up and working a 15 hour a day or doing a three hour commute, or whatever their what is, when their what is overwhelming. They need a 'why', and that's where the mission comes from, and that 'why' is what emotionalizes them to do great things.

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