Drucker’s five most important questions

Peter F. Drucker · 1993

What is our mission, who is our customer, what does the customer value, what are our results, what is our plan.

Its place in the frameworkVision Core›Mission Statement

What it does

Five questions in a deliberate order, each one difficult to answer honestly. The second and third carry the weight: naming the customer forces a choice, and answering what they value obliges you to admit you may not know. Everything else in the sequence depends on getting those two right.

Reach for it when: As the first conversation, before drafting anything. It works for a department as well as a company.
Where it stops: It is a discipline of questioning, not a method of answering. Everything depends on whether the room is willing to say something uncomfortable.

Peter F. Drucker, The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization, Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Why it sits at Mission Statement

What the organisation actually does now, for whom, and to what end — written so that the people doing it would recognise their own week in it.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

The statementThe mission-statement literature descending from Pearce and David on what a mission has to contain to be usable rather than decorative.
ScopeLevitt’s marketing myopia, and Abell’s three-dimensional definition of a business by customer group, customer need and technology.
RecognisabilityArgyris & Schön on espoused theory against theory-in-use — the reason an organisation can hold a statement sincerely and act against it.
Keeping it currentThe corporate-strategy work on scope redefinition, and on the cost of a stated scope that no longer matches where the revenue comes from.

All of Mission Statement

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Mission Statement lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Vision StatementThe mission is the present-tense half of the same pair; the vision is the state it is working towards.
Goal CorePurpose says why the organisation exists at all; the mission says what it is doing about that this year.
Business CoreScope decides which value propositions are in bounds and which are a different business.
Market CoreA scope drawn around a product rather than a need is where market shifts arrive as surprises.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Mission Statement too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

The Ashridge mission modelA mission holds when purpose, strategy, values and standards of behaviour all reinforce one another.

Elsewhere in Vision Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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