Most corporations have a Mission Statement.
Go to their website and look at their About page. A Mission Statement might be explicitly stated or it might be embedded within a ‘core values” or ‘corporate principles” statement.
It’s there, hiding, somewhere in the digital fluff.
However, personally, I question the value of these corporate Mission Statements.
Many are written too vaguely to help with any specific decision and most managers within a corporation, outside of the boardroom and the C-Suite, might not have fully bought into the mission statement.
Also, at the employee level – where micro-decisions are being made on behalf of clients, vendors, and customer everyday – its unlikely the explicit mission statement plays any practical role outside of the boundaries pre-existing cultural norms,
All that being said, the Mission Statement – even a poorly crafted one – does have the possibility of clarifying your sense of purpose and giving you a sense of direction, and lets face it, although the most important thing for any enterprise is to just start, its certainly helpful to take that first step in the generally right direction: North, not South. East, not West.
But all Mission Statements must start with some beliefs.
Often these beliefs are born from one ’s prior experiences, and my two principle beliefs that drive this website are no exception.
My first belief is that the Digital World (and by Digital World I am referring to 1.0 technologies such as TV and the Internet, 2.0 technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and 3.0 technologies such as Artificial intelligence, Virtual Reality, Big Data, and the Semantic Web) has the potential to improve peoples health at both the personal and public level.
However I have a second, more strong held belief: the Digital World, more often than not, actually damages a person’s health.
(Of note, the engineer and physician inside of me don’t like to hold these somewhat contradictory beliefs but oddly, the physicist inside struggles less!).
So now my website’s mission comes into focus.
The mission of MatthewRehrl.com is to untangle the dilemma of Digital World’s potential to improve people’s health with the Digital World’s current actual state of mostly damaging people’s health.
“Potential”. “Actual”. “Digital Worlds”. “Untangle”. This Mission Statement is so arrogant it can stand shoulder to shoulder with with the best of corporate healthcare’s Mission Statements! i am quite proud of it.
But as a alluded to above, the value of a Mission Statement is marginal unless it can be applied at a practical level.
This is where my background as a doctor who has seen over 100,000 patients comes in to play.
You see, this website isn’t about Mission Statements, theories of causality, or the philosophies embedded in the various healthcare cultural systems.
Instead, it will be centered around practical information. Information such as how to use Facebook to get more people vaccinated in a medical practice, or how to get more kids in the community to wear properly fitting helmets riding bikes, or how to use Twitter to hire the best possible doctors for a medical practice.
Because just as medicine is the practical application of the biological sciences, and engineering is the practical application of the physical sciences, my hope is MatthewRehrl.com becomes a useful social media guide for people working in healthcare to improve the health of the people they serve.