how to write a company manifesto

Before any theory, here is a real one. Technoraid prepared and supported vehicles for desert rally raid, and its manifesto was called the Technoraid Way.

It mattered more than most documents of its kind because ignoring it could put somebody in danger. In the middle of a desert, team spirit is not a value on a wall. Nobody gets left behind, and that sentence has an operational meaning.

Which is the useful way into this subject. A company manifesto sets out what makes an organisation what it is and what its leaders are committing to, through its values, its principles, its view of the future and its social and economic undertakings.

Manifestos are less common than values statements, and they are considerably more useful for telling candidates and clients what actually guides you. Beyond an inventory of shared values, a sincere one is a promise that makes somebody want to join you.

So the question of how to write a company manifesto has an answer in six elements, and one uncomfortable implication running underneath all six. A manifesto is a liability rather than a message, because a promise creates an obligation and somebody will have to keep it.

What gets written	Why it fails	What changes it
A message for the audienceMost advice on how to write a company manifesto treats it as marketing: an emotional declaration addressed to customers, drafted by an agency or written in the second person to draw the reader in.	Nobody can be held to itA document written for people rather than by them binds nobody. Aspirational phrasing makes it unenforceable by design, and staff learn quickly that a promise no one can invoke is decoration rather than a commitment.	Treat it as an obligationA manifesto is a liability. It has to be written collaboratively by the people who will keep it, in the first person plural, stating what is already provable rather than what is hoped for, and it has to be usable by somebody who wants to hold you to it.

A real manifesto, before the theory

Worth reading an actual one before any principles, because the principles make more sense once you have seen what they produce. This is the manifesto of a business I ran, and it exists in the form set out below rather than in a tidier version written for this article.

The values underneath it

Technoraid’s values were deliberately short, and each carried a sentence explaining what it obliged somebody to do rather than what it announced.

• Made to measure. Listen to clients to understand their needs and adapt their vehicle to their particular use. Our clients are unique and so are our solutions.
• Environment. Develop environmental education among our own staff, and work with clients towards tourism that is respectful and shares its benefits.
• Responsibility. Recognise that the sporting and cultural adventures we offer are a means of contributing to the living conditions of local populations.
• Community. Build a business where experience is shared and successes are collective victories. This is what team spirit means here.
• Innovation. With boldness and imagination, enrich what we do by seeking innovations that add service quality for clients.

Notice that four of the five describe an action rather than a quality. That is the difference between a value somebody can apply on a Tuesday and a word on a careers page.

The manifesto itself

We are Technoraid, and this is the Technoraid Way. Not simply a method, but a manifesto, a code of conduct and a fixed point to navigate by.

Team spirit as our standard. Joining Technoraid means joining a culture with no room for a backyard repair that will probably hold. Transparency, excellence and client satisfaction are the pillars of the ordinary working day.

Our values as our compass. They are the base of our identity. We are one team, joined by the pursuit of performance, endurance and winning, and those are not empty words but a description of what we commit to in the workshop and in the desert alike.

Commitment as our signature. Every member is asked to live the Technoraid Way, to think about what it means, to embody it and to keep it alive. Our culture turns our words into concrete acts, which is what we are proud of.

A culture of quality. Our commitment to quality is unshakeable and visible in every action and every decision. We forge our own reputation, building a future in which quality is never an option.

Innovation as our appetite. Every day is a chance to dare, to innovate and to improve. Your ideas feed our culture, shape our difference and strengthen our position.

Unity as our strength. A victory belongs to everybody. Team spirit means acting with responsibility, courage and cooperation, and together we turn challenges into results and obstacles into openings.

Performance as our pursuit. We believe everybody can progress, sharpen their expertise and push their limits. Whatever your role, your commitment is what makes the whole business grow.

What it commits somebody to

The manifesto closed with seven undertakings, and these are the part that makes it a liability rather than a statement.

• Cohesion without gaps, in the workshop as in the desert.
• Going beyond your own limits, for every member of the team.
• Client relationships beyond the conventional.
• Scrupulous respect for our commitments on cost, quality and timing.
• Careful and precise listening to client needs, as the foundation of what we do.
• Recognition and consideration for every team member, and openness to their ideas.
• An ethic and a respect for the environment that do not bend.

Read the fourth one again. Cost, quality and timing, stated as a scrupulous obligation, in a document handed to clients and to new staff.

That is a sentence a client can quote back at you when a delivery slips, and a sentence a mechanic can cite when asked to cut a corner. Which is exactly what a manifesto is for, and exactly why most organisations write something vaguer.

Why a manifesto is a liability rather than a message

Almost every guide to this treats the manifesto as an outward-facing message designed to make people feel something. That framing produces documents nobody can use, and the reason sits in a single observation about who keeps the promise.

A promise other people have to keep

It is acceptable for a company’s values to be formulated by its leadership, on the condition that their implementation is then carried out by managers and their teams. A manifesto is different. A manifesto is collaborative or it is nothing.

A manifesto decided by a chief executive alone in an office amounts to making a promise that other people will be required to keep. That is not a communications problem, it is a governance one.

Which reframes the whole exercise. The document creates an obligation, the obligation lands on staff and managers, and the only interesting question is whether the people carrying it had any part in writing it.

The enforceability test

Follow that through and you get a test the marketing guides cannot offer, because their advice is designed to avoid failing it.

Can a member of staff cite your manifesto to decline an instruction? Can a candidate quote a line of it back at you during an interview and expect an answer? Can a client invoke it when you have fallen short?

If the answer to all three is no, you have written marketing copy. There is nothing wrong with marketing copy, and it does not do the job a manifesto exists to do.

The standard advice to write in the second or third person, drawing the reader into a story, exists precisely to keep a document unenforceable. It reads beautifully and it binds nobody, which is why a manifesto is written in the first person plural.

Element one, know your values and your purpose

The first step is being clear about your values, which means precise ones, understood by your people and used daily by managers. Not website values.

Real values, not website values

This asks for something harder than a list of portmanteau words, and careers pages are still full of them. Excellence, leadership, respect and integrity, in that order, with nothing underneath any of them.

Unless of course you operate in a sector where those things are genuinely unusual, in which case claiming them tells a candidate something real.

The test is whether a manager used the value this month to settle a decision. A value that has never resolved an argument is a word rather than a value, and there is more on what the useful ones look like in the collection of the most inspiring company values.

Purpose, and why Australia has no legal version of it

Purpose describes how a business intends to play a role in society beyond its economic activity. It descends from what English-speaking business calls a mission statement, with an element of corporate responsibility attached.

France put a version of this into company law, creating a formal status for businesses that write a purpose into their constitution. Australia has no equivalent, so here the concept remains voluntary and cultural rather than statutory.

The closest Australian analogue is certification rather than legislation. B Corp status requires an independent assessment against social and environmental standards and a constitutional amendment to consider stakeholders, which is a voluntary version of the same idea and considerably harder to fake than a paragraph on a website.

Whichever route you take, purpose answers why you do what you do, and it has to be shared rather than drafted. Neither values nor purpose can be outsourced to consultants, and neither can be manufactured to suit whatever the market currently rewards.

Vision, and where it belongs

The third piece is vision, which answers what you want to become or achieve in future. A manifesto should contribute to the long-term problem the business exists to solve.

Frog Design’s manifesto promises, among other things, to improve the world and to save the environment, which is vision doing its work inside a manifesto rather than instead of one.

Only once you have formulated your values, meaning how you treat clients, suppliers, staff and the environment, your purpose, meaning why you do what you do, and your vision, meaning what you want to become, can you build a manifesto that is not decoration.

Element two, be collaborative or do not bother

A manifesto is the promise of reaching a future that has not happened yet. It has to make candidates want to join something, commit existing staff to giving their best, and reassure clients that the message is real.

Why the audience has to own the message

You have to give the audience the right to take possession of your message and your purpose. Candidates, colleagues and clients need to read your sentences and imagine the same future you do, then decide to join it.

There is no trick to this. Either you can afford an agency to produce something as good as the great campaign lines, or you involve the people affected so that they work on it and commit to it, which is the better way to build a community that shares the same values.

A manifesto is a commitment taken collectively, and historically the form was written by groups sharing a perspective, an ideology or a common objective. Including your audience as a partner is not a nice addition to the process, it is the process.

What happens when a leader writes it alone

Three things happen and all of them are visible from outside. The document uses vocabulary nobody in the business recognises, which staff notice within a week.

It commits to standards nobody was consulted about, which means the first time somebody is held to one they experience it as an ambush rather than as a shared undertaking.

And it gets quoted only by the person who wrote it. A manifesto that circulates without its author is working. A manifesto that only ever appears in the chief executive’s slides is a personal statement with a company logo on it.

Elements three and four, be inspiring and be sincere

Where values communicate your beliefs and purpose explains your reasons, the manifesto carries the emotion that animates the organisation. It is also where insincerity is most easily detected.

The emotion is what people retain

To paraphrase Maya Angelou, people forget what you said and what you did, and they never forget how you made them feel. That is the job the manifesto does that a values list cannot.

It exists to reach a candidate looking for a job who finds a conviction instead, a member of staff holding a job who finds a vocation, and a client looking for a supplier who finds a partner. Each of those is a change in what somebody thinks they are doing.

The best examples read as invitations to join a movement rather than as announcements. Which is achievable without an agency, and considerably harder to fake than a set of adjectives.

Transparency is no longer optional

Given that a manifesto reflects the sum of what makes an organisation what it is, it obviously has to be sincere. Which is why you start with real values and a shared purpose rather than with the writing.

Lying with your values now amounts to tossing a coin over the future of the business. Honesty and transparency are expected by increasingly sceptical customers and candidates who want to know what sits behind a job advertisement or a product.

The transparency of your practices arrives whether you choose it or not. Anonymous accounts collecting employee experiences by industry have become a standard research step for candidates, and they expose opportunistic messaging faster than any competitor could.

Which means integrity has become a recruitment subject rather than an ethical one. It contributes to brand preference, it validates your employer offer with candidates and their networks, and it strengthens the client relationship, and I have set out how that offer gets tested in the difference between being an employer of choice and having an employer brand.

Elements five and six, be singular and be provable

The last two elements decide whether the document is usable. One concerns how distinctive it is, and the other concerns the tense it is written in, which sounds like a grammatical detail and is the most consequential rule here.

Clear and unique

If it is clear and authentic your manifesto becomes a powerful way of gathering people around the business, its employer offer and its products. It anchors your convictions and shares them with those who want to work with you or buy from you.

Look again at the Frog example. Behind messages that are clear to the point of seeming simplistic sit ideas that go a long way down, which is what clarity buys you rather than what it costs.

Authenticity and simplicity are the two ingredients that let a manifesto align your communication with your principles. Say without ambiguity who you are, what you do, how you do it and why you do it.

Values can be shared between organisations, as any survey of large listed companies demonstrates. Once you get into the detail, into the working and living experience your staff actually share, you cannot be the same as anybody else, and that is where the singularity lives.

A manifesto cannot reduce to notions already seen and reused across a market without becoming ordinary. For it to be identity-forming, meaning genuinely differentiating, and managerial, meaning capable of driving change, it has to be interesting and bring a genuinely new view. It does not need to command unanimous agreement. It shows the heart of the business.

Provable today, not aspirational

Here is the sixth element and the one that separates a manifesto from every adjacent document. A manifesto states what is provable now. A vision states what you intend to become. Confusing the two produces a text that inspires nobody and binds no one.

Which makes the opening words of each line a test rather than a stylistic choice. These openings work, because each of them can be checked against something that already happens.

• What motivates us is…
• We are responsible for…
• Our watchword is…
• We share the conviction that…

And these openings do not, because none of them can be verified against anything and none of them creates an obligation.

• We aim to…
• We hope to…
• We expect…

Those three are statements of vision, which has to come true one day. A manifesto is what is already proven, which is why the present tense is not a preference.

In most cases the document takes the form of text, and it can run to a single sentence or fill a page. Stay faithful to your own philosophy and keep it simple, because if the message speaks to you there is a strong chance it will reach your readers. It can equally be expressed as images, video or music, provided that suits the character of the business.

How to tell a manifesto from marketing copy

Six checks separate the two, and they can be run on a draft in about ten minutes. Run them on your own document before publishing it, and on a competitor’s before being impressed by it.

Six checks on a draft

Read the failure column first, since that is where most drafts land and it is more diagnostic than the pass column.

Check	A manifesto	Marketing copy
Who wrote it	A group including the people who will keep the promise	A leader, an agency, or a communications team
Grammatical person	First person plural, we	Second or third person, you or they
Tense	Present, describing what already happens	Future or conditional, describing intent
Enforceability	A staff member can cite it to decline an instruction	Nobody can invoke it for anything
Specificity	Contains at least one undertaking somebody wanted removed	Contains nothing anybody objected to
Circulation	Quoted by people other than its author	Appears only in leadership presentations

The fifth check is the one I would run first if I had time for only one. A document that survived review without a single argument was not saying anything that cost the organisation something.

The sixth is the only one that cannot be run on a draft, and it is the most reliable of the six. Six months after publication, ask who has quoted it.

Where to start if you have neither values nor a manifesto

Start with the values, and specifically with the ones already operating rather than the ones already published. Ask ten people what the values of the business are without showing them the website, and write down what comes back.

Then the purpose, which is a slower conversation and cannot be delegated. Then the vision, kept separate and written in the future tense where it belongs.

Only then the manifesto, drafted collaboratively, in the present tense, with at least one line somebody wanted taken out. The engagement work that surrounds all of this is set out in the case study on soft skills and engagement.

You can also read a manifesto written from the other side of the table, since the iconoclast manifesto states what a particular kind of employee is asking of you rather than what you are promising them.

How I can help you write yours

The writing is the easy part and almost never the problem. What organisations need help with is establishing what is actually true before anybody starts drafting, and then holding the specific sentences against the pressure to soften them.

Workshops on values, purpose and the manifesto

The workshop runs the sequence in order, values first and the manifesto last, with the drafting done by a mixed group rather than by a communications team. Most of the value appears in the argument about which undertakings survive.

Employee experience and employer brand sessions cover the same ground from a different angle, since a manifesto is one of the few documents that speaks to candidates, staff and clients at once. There is more on the first of those in what people actually notice about working for you.

Keynotes and diagnostics

Keynotes suit the moment when an organisation has published values nobody uses and is considering publishing something else. Explaining why the last document failed is more useful than launching the next one.

The diagnostic establishes the distance between your published values and your operating ones, which is the same measurement that decides whether a manifesto will be believed.

If you want to test a draft, a conversation beats a proposal. You can send me the sentence somebody wanted removed and we can work out whether the document survives without it.

Conclusion: write something you can be held to

A company manifesto sets out what makes an organisation what it is and what its leadership is committing to. Six elements build it: real values, collaborative authorship, emotion, sincerity, singular clarity, and language that describes what is already provable.

Underneath all six sits one observation. A manifesto written by a leader alone is a promise other people will have to keep, which makes the document a liability rather than a message and changes who has to be in the room.

So the answer to how to write a company manifesto is to write something somebody could use against you. A staff member declining an instruction, a candidate asking a question at interview, a client pointing at a line when you fall short.

Keep the sentence somebody wanted removed. That sentence is the manifesto, and everything around it is context.

Frequently asked questions about company manifestos