You should be able to articulate your company’s purpose succinctly, in one or two sentences. This is called a “Statement of Purpose.” A statement of purpose should quickly and clearly convey why your company exists, how it fills basic human needs and impacts the world.

A good purpose statement is broad, fundamental, inspirational, and enduring. It should serve to guide your organization for at least 100 years. It should serve to guide your organization for at least 100 years.

It’s good practice to codify your vision on paper. Writing it down forces you to think rigorously about what exactly you are trying to do. Even more important, it’s a critical step in making it the organization’s vision, rather than the vision of a single leader.

Think about another analogy. Building a great company is similar to writing a great novel—you need an overall conception (vision), a plot (strategy), and creative ideas to move the plot along. You also must sweat over each sentence, executing the book word-by-word, line-by-line, page-by-page. Hemingway was once asked why he’d rewritten the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. He responded simply, “Getting the words right.

This corporate détente, if you will, wouldn’t have been possible, I think, without the Five Year Compact.
The document, while providing great comfort to Pixar employees, prompted several complaints from the Disney Studios human resources department. The complaints boiled down to the fact that they didn’t care for the exceptionalism that our carefully guarded policies implied. My response to this stemmed less from a loyalty to Pixar than from my commitment to a larger idea: In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work. This fosters a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company that, to my mind, benefits the larger enterprise.

Plan your promises, and promise only what you can deliver. Once those goals are part of the public record, keep an inventory of evidence that supports your claim to have accomplished them. Without blowing your own horn, it can be helpful in those early months to call attention to the early successes that align with what you have already identified as priorities for the company’s success and growth.

Not all early actions may be happy ones, but they are worth emphasizing if they help the organization move in the direction you want. An example is the September issue of Bob Eckert’s company-wide intranet column “What’s On My Mind?” written five months after he arrived at Mattel.