ISM has suggested that conventional thinking about private-independent school mission statements should be revisited. School leaders, caught between the need to craft an (1) inspirational, (2) compelling, and (3) marketing-effective statement, on the one hand, and a (4) comprehensive, (5) actionable, and (6) outcome explicit statement, on the other, have too often found the result unsatisfactory. The commonly experienced result has been a 30-word mission statement that attempts all of the above, thereby appearing cluttered, confused, and sometimes (necessarily) similar to those of competing schools.