In your workplace: employment advice

My general practice wants to develop a mission statement for the organisation; how should we go about doing this?

I have worked in enough organisations to have a healthy cynicism regarding mission statements. I still recall the following one: 'It is our responsibility to globally build virtual services that endeavour to promote high-payoff paradigms that exceed customer expectations.' What does this mean?

Too often a new chief executive (or senior partner/manager) is keen to come up with a corny, clichéd statement while everyone else is keen to focus on doing their jobs effectively.

However, I do believe a mission statement can be a useful tool for an organisation, despite receiving mixed views from staff (usually because they were not involved in the motto's creation or management does not 'live it').I once asked the board of an organisation what its mission statement was and the long silence was revealing and uncomfortable.