Skeptics have long dismissed corporate mission statements as decoration — interchangeable paragraphs about excellence and integrity that are drafted for press releases, framed in lobbies, and otherwise ignored. The skeptics point to studies finding no reliable correlation between the mere existence of a mission statement and a firm's subsequent financial performance, and they conclude that such statements are, at best, harmless and, at worst, a substitute for substance.

A more recent line of research accepts the skeptics' data but disputes their interpretation. These researchers argue that asking whether a firm has a mission statement is the wrong question; what matters is whether the stated values are enacted — that is, whether they actually govern decisions about hiring, promotion, and the allocation of resources. When the researchers distinguished firms whose employees reported that stated values were consistently reflected in day-to-day decisions from firms whose employees reported a gap between proclaimed and actual priorities, a difference emerged: the former group showed measurably higher employee retention and, over several years, stronger operating performance, while the latter group performed no better than firms with no stated values at all.

The implication, these researchers stress, is not that writing a better mission statement improves results. A firm cannot purchase the benefit by polishing its prose. The benefit, where it exists, comes from the costly and sustained alignment of conduct with stated values; the statement itself is merely a public marker that such alignment may — or may not — be occurring behind it. A firm that proclaims values it does not enact, they note, may even fare worse than one that proclaims nothing, since the visible gap can breed cynicism among the very employees the statement was meant to inspire.