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Mission Creep

Temptations and Solutions
Robert Hodge | posted 10/24/2007
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

In 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the March of Dimes to help fight polio, the disease that had crippled him. The charity funded research into vaccines, and within two decades polio had largely become a relic of the past. The March of Dimes, however, persisted. In 1958, its Expanded Program covered polio, birth defects, arthritis and central nervous system diseases. Later transferring its arthritis interests to another organization, it then focused on the prevention of birth defects and infant mortality. Most recently, the March of Dimes has added the prevention of premature birth to its mission objectives.

 Is this a job well done, or did the leaders fall prey to mission creep?

"Mission creep" sounds like an insidious force that changes an organization's primary focus to something less than its mission, vision, and heritage. while it may not be all that insidious, mission creep is a documented phenomenon that usually damages an organization. Here, we will consider forces ...

See also:

 governance, mission, mission creep, mission drift, mission statement