No. An "origin story" is not better than a mission statement if you don't put stuff around them.
“Culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent” ~ Peter Drucker
Let me start off by saying, I kinda hate this article > > No one cares about your company’s mission statement. Leaders, focus on this instead. I’m sure the author and the subject of the article have the best intentions but they both miss the mark (IMHO). My two greatest schools in this were the Pentagon, where I worked alongside men and women from all the service branches and Amazon, where I got an extended, at-work MBA on how culture eats strategy for breakfast. Every. Single. Time. Now I need to ad that Peter Drucker never actually said that. What he did say was that “Culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent” (Corporate Culture: Use It Don’t Lose it, p. 151) - but I like them both.
Here’s the tl;dr on the article - the subject, one Danny Brooks, who has great cred from Starbucks and Ideo, thinks that origin stories - how the company was started - have more power to affect change and guide people than do mission statements. On its face I agree with the sentiment but I think it misses on depth. Further on in that same book, Drucker states that if you want to change how people operate, change how they operate but don’t try to change the culture. Now a word about culture - I’m an anthropologist so by law, I’m required to have a favorite anthropologist and mine happens to be Clifford Geertz. Now Geertz described culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life." (1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books). If you look at missions statements and/or origin stories, they hit the first point - they are a symbolic expression of knowledge and attitudes. They both fail, however, on the points of “perpetuate” and “develop.” They don’t fail for any inherent reason but they are just flat, descriptions of a culture. The hard lesson, is that it is in the daily, lived experiences of people in your org that hit the last two points - those experiences perpetuate and and develop how people understand and interpret your culture. How does this play out? I’ve got a couple examples.
First, when I worked in the Pentagon, I worked alongside soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. One example of how a mission statement manifest itself in the daily, lived experiences of people comes from the USMC. “Every Marine is, first and foremost, a rifleman. All other conditions are secondary” is a quote attributed to General Alfred M. Gray, the 29th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps. You could consider that a mission statement; that, if needed, every person in this org should be able to fight. The way this manifested was in the Marines I worked with doing “PT” - physical training - working out, running, etc. on a daily basis - during the work day. That last part is key. Staying fit was seen as core to the mission statement of being able to fight and so working out wasn’t something you had to wait until work was over to do - it was part of work. The mission statement was reinforced every day in the experience of Marines.
\My second example is from my time at Amazon. When I found out I had a phone screen that could might just lead to a full interview loop, I started asking some folks for tips about the loop would go. They told me to know about the leadership principles since the questions would be framed around them. I had been at companies before that had mission/vision statements and had an idea how line up answers with them. Evidently I did well enough because I got the job. I’d been in my new role a couple of weeks and was starting to know enough to start hitting all the meetings. Funny thing started happening in those meetings - I started hearing people kind of quoting the LPs…like that idea wasn’t Think Big enough or we really need to Dive Deep on this one. It dawned on me that the LPs were actually being used to manage projects, to shape how we thought about new ideas - they were part of the lived, daily experience at Amazon and acquired meaning.
We all sort of knew the origin story of Amazon. We had all read the original letter that Jeff Bezos penned to the shareholders in 1997. I mean Amazon names all of its buildings after important moments, customers (my two favs - Wainwright and Low Flying Hawk), programs (Doppler, Fiona), and even a dog (Rufus), so the history is right there - but it isn’t impactful to the daily, lived experience. The LPs - those are supposed to govern. Now I had the opportunity to sit in on one S-Team meeting - those are meetings with all the senior leadership..so mine had Bezos, Wilke, Jassy, etc. The coolest thing was that it ran like all the other meetings and the LPs were used.
All of these stories just tell me that call it whatever you want - principles, tenets, mission/vision statements, origin story…UNLESS whatever it is becomes part of the actual culture, the live experience of how people make meaning of what’s going on at the company; then they are both worthless. That’s the hardest truth - that making any of these things stick takes consistent, ongoing effort. Leadership starts behaving in a way that’s out of alignment with what is said, the culture becomes toxic. People are pretty good BS sensors.