Persistent Evolution

Share Your Vision to Achieve Your Mission

It is an executive’s role to affect how people approach their work, not merely what they do while working. Vision and mission statements are a small part of this, but they are helpful tools if you get them right. Over the course of a career, I spent significant time contemplating how to create a cultural framework around the teams I led. Whether in command of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team or managing some of the Nation’s most significant and sensitive criminal and national security investigations, I found that groups bonded through shared vision and sense of mission are much more likely to succeed in the face of adversity. As famed business author Jim Collins wrote in Built to Last, “A deeply held core ideology gives a company both a strong sense of identity and a thread of continuity that holds the organization together in the face of change.”

Vision and mission statements are commonplace amongst organizations, and there is good reason for that. While both vision and mission statements are intended to engage a variety of stakeholders, in my experience they are most effective internal to an organization. A vision statement can communicate values and act as a guide to decision making, while a mission statement can define an organization’s purpose and help to unify employees. Both are tools for leaders to affect how people think about their work. It is essential to build the right statements for your organization that will outlast you as a leader, allowing for continuity in evolution.

Adapt to Your Goals and Environment

Global coffee purveyor Starbucks provides a great example of a company that has adapted over time to its growth, a changing customer base, and an evolving world. Starbucks has published four mission statements over the course of its existence, and each spoke to the focus of the company in its different stages.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Starbucks did not have a formal mission statement and its coffee shops were generally limited to the Pacific Northwest. The first of its mission statements was adopted in 1990 as the company began to grow outside of its home region. Starbucks had only 84 stores at the time and the statement highlighted growth through a differentiation strategy built on quality.

• 1990: “Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles as we grow.”

Eighteen years later, the company had grown to 16,680 stores internationally and recognized the need for new context for its employees. Their new mission statement conveyed maintaining the localized sense of intimacy so many appreciate in a coffee shop. Certainly attractive to potential customers, this was also a reminder to employees to focus on how the company could still provide human connection through individual interactions in a local coffee shop while the company continued to grow.

• 2008: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

In 2023, with nearly 32,000 stores, then Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan adopted the mission statement the company holds today. One still focused on human connection, but from a worldwide perspective.

• 2023: “With every cup, with every conversation, with every community – we nurture the limitless possibilities of human connection.”

And most recently, as part of his “Back to Starbucks” effort, current CEO Brian Niccol chose to blend Starbucks first mission statement with it’s 2008 mission statement in his January 9th, 2025 letter to partners. Taking a piece of Starbucks initial mission statement, which focused on a differentiation business strategy, and coupling it with the 2008 statement about how Starbucks wanted its customers to feel, is a call to action for employees to focus on the fundamentals that have made Starbucks successful over the years.

• 2025: “To be the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world, inspiring and nurturing the human spirit - one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

What I’ve Learned

My experience in adapting vision and mission statements to both the evolving goals of an organization and an ever changing set of customer expectations started in 2017, when I returned to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team as commander. At the time, there were dynamic changes beginning across the FBI’s tactical program, which consists of the Hostage Rescue Team, the SWAT teams in each field office, and the FBI’s crisis negotiators. I found we were encumbered with paragraph long vision and mission statements that seemed to have been written with internal auditing and compliance as their audience. These statements were posted near the door frequently used by visitors to access our building and were routinely ignored by my teammates.

In choosing vision and mission statements I had a lot to work with. The Hostage Rescue Team was 34 years old at the time, with a storied history of both success and very challenging missions. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with some of the finest professionals in tactical operations, not only in the United States but around the world, and I knew the business environment in which we worked (colloquially referred to as the “threat landscape”) was changing rapidly. We faced new challenges of adversaries armed with encrypted communications technology, the availability of online instruction on fabricating explosives, and access to unmanned aerial systems.

I chose to simplify the vision and mission statements, embodying the how within the former and the why within the latter. Making them exceptionally short was intentional. I wanted them to be not only memorable, but “sticky”. The vision statement became “Persistent Evolution” to remind my teammates of our need to continually assess both environment and adversary in order to meet the FBI’s vision of staying “ahead of the threat”. As our mission statement we adopted “To Save Lives”. Written in Latin as “Servare Vitas”, the statement had long been part of the team logo. It remains a fitting and straightforward reason for the team’s existence, and one already embodied within team culture. The stickiness and value of these statements was proven to me on a visit back to the team years after my departure. While observing training adapted from lessons learned from past missions and changes in adversary capabilities, the lead instructor reminded me their tactics must persistently evolve to remain relevant.

What You Can Do

Does the team, group, or company you lead truly understand your vision of where you are headed and why? Do you have corporate statements that have become the core beliefs of your organizational culture or have they become outdated and ignored? Determining the answers to these questions is essential to understanding how people feel about their work, and through that, how they feel about the organization.

I find that some of the best opportunities to both assess and address corporate culture come in the space between the big missions, tight deadlines, and critical incidents. Here are some steps you might consider to take deliberate action in positively cultivating perspective in your organization:

• Assess whether there are core beliefs held across work units in your organization, or whether subcultures have their own dominant themes.

• Discuss with subordinate leaders what core beliefs are fundamental to the productivity of their unit and whether they align with both your vision of where the organization is headed and with each other.

• Engage subordinate leaders in collectively drafting a simple, memorable statement that builds cohesive thought and aligns efforts across your organization.

New Chapters

While companies and organizations adapt (or fail to adapt) to meet the challenges of their environments and seize new opportunities, so do their members. I have been a student of leadership and a practitioner of crisis management, high-reliability team building, and the development of organizational culture for many years, especially in the latter half of my career. I find that writing and speaking about these topics continues to broaden and refine my thinking, and therefore my contributions. The Creating Culture newsletter is intended to be a weekly exercise in studying, discussing, and sharing thoughts on topics important to building better teams and stronger organizations. Whether you and your organization are looking to prepare for the unexpected, seize new opportunities, or stay “ahead of the threat”, I hope you’ll join me.

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