Great Mission To Create A Competitive Advantage

How to obtain and maintain competitive advantage in enterprises has always been a hot and difficult issue in strategic management research. It is not difficult for us to realize that generally there are two angles in the current research on competitive advantage in academic field:one is from a strategic prospective, the other is from a cultural prospective. On the one hand, mission is the first step in corporate strategic planning; management guru Peter Drucker once said that establishing a clear corporate mission is the primary responsibility for all strategists. On the other hand, corporate culture has been one of the crucial origins of corporate competitive advantage with the coming of the era of knowledge economy; only when the corporate having its own outstanding culture can it obtain the continuous competitive advantage. Corporate mission is the cardinal element of corporate culture, being the soul of the company, and a great mission promotes the company's soul. Therefore, there is profound theoretical and practical significance to research on how competitive advantage help obtain and maintain corporate competitive advantage from a mission perspective.This paper analyzed the forming path of the competitive advantage from a corporate mission perspective combined with related theories on corporate mission and competitive advantage from both home and aboard, using approaches such as:classification, evaluation indicators, comparative analysis, induction interpretation, case analysis, and system analysis, etc. Firstly, the paper reviewed the relevant literatures on corporate mission and competitive advantage by Chinese and foreign scholars, then found the similarities and differences in mission statement by comparing the Chinese annual Most Admired Companies in 2009 (26 companies) and the American annual Most Admired Companies in 2010(20 companies), and the reasons that resulted in the varieties of corporate mission in those outstanding enterprises. Secondly, based on the comparative analysis along with the similarities of corporate mission statement in the most admired companies in both China and the U.S., this paper discussed the competitive advantage approaches created by the great mission from a cultural, strategic and systematic perspective. Finally, set out from the differences in corporate mission in the Most Admired Companies in China and the USA, this paper found the common problems that exist in Chinese enterprises in mission statement and put forward the strategy on using great missions to gain competitive advantage for Chinese enterprises:one is drawing essence of corporate culture construction in the excellent American companies, the second one is inheriting outstanding ideological mission statement from Chinese traditional culture. This paper concluded that companies with competitive edges have great missions, and companies can create competitive advantage to achieve sustainable development via forming great missions.