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elasticity of the airline industry Essays

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INTRODUCTION

In 1973 Peter Drucker wrote that “mission and philosophy is the key starting point in business” and claimed that the lack of thought and attention given to them as the cause of many frustrations and failures in business.
Subsequently Pearce (1982), David (1989), Campbell and Tawadey (1990) and others developed a body of knowledge on mission statements as a strategic tool essential for good management practice.

The Ashridge model:

MAINTAINING A CORPORATE FOCUS mission statement is a powerful instrument which can significantly influence the actions of an organisation

Campbell and Tawadey (1990) put the mission statement into the context of a mission model, entitled "The Ashridge
Mission Model", which comprises …show more content…

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Two thirds of responding organisations with more than 5000 employees had a mission statement compared with only 40% of smaller companies (klemm and redfearn 2004)

The majority (80.7%) of the people involved in compiling mission statements in UK companies were of director grade and above. Non- management employees account for only 4.8% of the personnel involved, with shareholders accounting for only 1% (Table 2). These results confirm the findings of Klemm et al. (1991) and Rigby (1998) that compiling the mission statement in a plc is a top-down process, generally the preserve of the most senior managers.

One reason that mission statements are so popular even though there is no direct evidence that they do any good is that there is no direct evidence that they do any good. In other words, companies adopt them . . .

. . . because no one can prove that they don't work. So what if you can't prove that mission statements have any direct effect on the bottom line--it's hard to prove that anything a company does has a direct effect on the bottom line. Even operating performance can be only tenuously linked to financial performance, in the opinion of many experts.

Mike Lovdal is vice president of Mercer Management Consulting Inc., which has surveyed hundreds of companies in this area. "A mission

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