The mission statement literature is dominated by the logic of compilation or what
Campbell and Yeung (1991) call the checklist of items. This logic takes a widely varied
collection of mission statements of actual organizations, analyzes and classifies
their constituent items, and pools all these items to form a comprehensive list. This list
is then used as the foundation of an “ideal” mission statement. This logic of
compilation is inconsistent with the practice of most organizations in the sense that a
single mission statement is rarely found having all or most of the items in the “ideal”
list. Nevertheless, these compilations of items are used as benchmarks to evaluate
and judge real mission statements, to suggest ways to improve them, and to give
advice on how to develop new effective ones.