Return on Mission

I think the simplest way to put it is that return on mission asks whether corporate affairs made the company more able to do what it was trying to do.

And by mission, I don't, I don't mean the slogan on the company website.

I mean the company's ability to pursue its strategy, to achieve its goals, to meet its obligations, and, and really to operate credibly under pressure.

And ROI just simply asks how much financial return did we get for this investment? But return on mission is asking a much broader question tied to our ability to shape that mission.

It's breaking it down into the value in terms of the value that we helped to enable, the value that we helped to protect or to recover, and whether we're able to reduce the cost of getting something hard done.

That might mean anything from, like, improving access to policymakers, addressing community resistance, helping leaders to make a better decision, keeping employees aligned, or preventing a problem from escalating, and all those things we've actually been talking about forever.

So the activities are not new, but I think what's different is now we're thinking about focusing on, okay, how do we measure them and attach them to how we're making it easier for the company to accomplish its goals? So it's not really replacing ROI.

It just simply puts ROI into a much more complete account of value because it's not just about something that's on your budget and money that you're spending.

It's about the work that you're doing inside and outside the company to bring pieces together to make big things happen.

We can also think about the difference between a market strategy and a non-market strategy.

So a lot of times when we think about market, we think about marketing or customers or commercial-

Sales.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But there's a whole lot more that goes onto it, and so marketing might make it easier for the sales to occur, but your non-market strategy makes it easier and a better spend for your marketing 'cause it operates even at a more upstream level.

So we can think about here where we're moving to think about where comms and corporate affairs is creating the very conditions for the actions that the company's doing, so it's further upstream.

So a return on mission here is asking whether all these conditions, good and bad, that's going on in the outside world and where we're operating are actually, through our work, improving and making it easier for the company to, to do what it set out to do.

So s- you're trying to account for the activities and the outcomes that, as you're calling, are non-market environments.

So really like you say with regulators, um, and other groups, you can call them stakeholders, who actually make it possible for the business to operate.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it's a whole lot of different aspects there, but the, the reality is the work has always been going on, but it's thinking about it in a, I guess we could say, economic terms.

Right.

We could use, for example, the expression of transaction costs, which is something that comes out of economics, and it's certainly about being more efficient.

But well, guess what? You're being efficient with your communications, right? And we can think-