ABSTRACT
In my earlier book, I used the concept of the primary task to discriminate between the varied goals of industrial enterprises. I defined it as the task that an institution had been created to perform. I now think that ‘created’ was an unfortunate word. It carried too much the connotation of an act performed once and for all, and hence tended to belie, by implication, that a primary task could change with time. In consequence, the definition was less useful than it might have been as a starting-point for making decisions about change. At the time, I compared and contrasted the concept with Bion's sophisticated task from which it had been derived. After publication of the book I found that Wilmot (1952) had used a similar image in his description of the campaign in Italy during the second world war, and that Selznick's (1957) concept of ‘mission’ was very close in meaning.
