Is your teenager rebellious? Your spouse ungrateful? Your dog uncooperative? Does your family have trouble pulling together? Does it often seem as if you’re coming apart? Does your family suffer from that painful private ailment: dysfunction?
Well, dear friend, it’s pretty clear what the problem is. What your family lacks, and needs, is . . . a mission statement.
That’s right, a mission statement. No modern institution should be without one. No ancient institution either, for that matter. Indeed, it seems nowadays that no institution of any sort is without one.
Walk into just about any corporate office and you’ll find posted on the wall or contained in a brochure a mission statement–a high-minded assertion of the company’s purposes, usually crafted by an interdepartmental team assisted by consultants and employing numerous flip charts and colored markers.
And it’s not just corporations doing this. In recent years, many parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago have adopted mission statements (that old one about going and teaching all nations and baptizing them in the name of the Father and so forth presumably having proven inadequate).
Now for a corporation, or any artificially created organization, this makes a certain sense. But for a family?
“Every family should have a mission statement,” Kathy Peel, the author of a new book of advice for working mothers, earnestly told an interviewer on CNN a few days ago.
Just why never became clear, but presumably it assures that everybody on the family organization chart will employ their skill sets to achieve common goals and objectives, thereby enhancing the return on investment of all stakeholders.
Or maybe it’ll just get your teenager to take out the garbage without too much squawking.
