Mission statement and performance in the higher education system

Organizations are systems that can be compared by analogy with an airplane, in which flight scheme is the strategic planning of the organization, the destination is the vision statement and the mission statement is the flight plan. To get to the destination in a safe and efficient way, on the flight plan certain variables must be determined. Type of the plane, range, altitude, course, fuel consumption, cruise speed, wind direction, airplanes in the area, total weight and total amount of passenger are just a couple of them and instruments must be on place to measure and control these variables and make the adjustments when necessary to correct small flaws. Back to our analogy, the organization have variables that must be clearly remarked on the mission statement, how the monitoring of the competition (airplanes in the area), and the economic policies (wind direction), clients and markets (number of passengers), principal service or product (course), geographic region served (range), technological core (type of the plane), key concepts on their own philosophy (cruise speed, total weight and total amount of passenger), and their commitment with profitability (altitude).