Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Lehman Brothers' Mission Statement

By Maria Gabriela Marin
In the "Strategic Managemet A Primer" by Parthasarthy & Booke, we are reminded that a firm's mission statement "is a description of the firm's current task or business and market position (who the firm presently is), its vision for the future (what it intends to become), and how it plans to get to its future position (values and targets that will guide its actions toward the vision)."
For this analysis, I selected the mission statement of Lehman Brothers:
"We are One Firm, defined by our unweavering commitment to our clients, our shareholders, and each other, Our vision is to build unrivaled partnerships with and value for our clients, through the knowledge, creativity, and dedication of our people, leading to superior results for our shareholders."
Lehman Brothers' mission statement lacks a description of its core business and current market position. It will be difficult for someone, who is not familiar with the firm, to discern from the above statement that Lehman Brothers is a global financial services company that serves corporations, governments and individuals.
I believe that its vision for the future clearly states its purpose and more importantly its commitment to Lehman Brothers' clients and shareholders. Moreover, it describes how it intends to accomplish these results by relying on the talent of their people.

7 comments:

tony_yao said...

I agree with you Maria on how Lehman Brother's mission statement is lacking quite a bit of important characteristics.

Lehman Brothers has a good general idea for a mission statement overall. That is to create value throughout the firm so it leads to superior results for shareholders. We can say that this idea holds true for most publicly traded companies.

Lastly they are definitely lacking what type of business or industry they are in and what type of clients they serve.

Productive Procrastinator said...

I agree with your comment on how Lehman Brothers' statement has no description of their core business. Although, they provided us with their purpose and goal for the future, their statement leaves us with little knowledge of the services they are providing nor where do they stand in their environment. Through my interpretation of it, I feel that Lehman Brothers does have the right approach with the way they aim their mission statement toward clients and shareholders. To turn their mission statement into a great one, I think that they can be more informative. They should not only inform prospective shareholders more on their services, but also include a little about their corporate governance. As an investor sometimes, one likes to learn more about what a firm does and how competent is their corporate governance. What do you think?

manageboard said...

The statement is brief, but it describes the company’s core values – building and maintaining good relationships with their stakeholders, clients, shareholders and employees who have made the firm a leading financial sector in their industry. However, Lehman Brothers’ mission statement definitely lacks description of its core business and market position. I agree with Gaby that if I wasn’t too familiar with the firm I wouldn’t know what position Lehman Brothers has in the financial industry.
The mission statement should also entail the company’s objectives and how it plans on meeting those objectives. How does the company expect to expand and grow in the future?

Maria Gabriela Marin said...

Thanks Productive Procrastinator for your comment on my analysis of Lehman Brother's Mission Statement.

I completely agree with you in that as an investor and/or client, I would like to understand what they do. In regards, to your concern about corporate governance, Lehman's website has a section that provides the names of Committee members and their responsibilities.

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