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Precisely defining your business – your essential purpose in the market
Clearly defining the broader purpose you want your business to serve in the
market is essential to becoming a world class enterprise. Here are a few
examples:
Example
1
Marks and Spencer, the world renowned
UK
retailing chain, redefined their business as “Social Revolution”. They saw their
business as an agent for subverting or undermining the class structure of
nineteenth-century England by giving access to the working and lower middle
classes, goods of better than upper class quality, and yet at prices the working
class customers could easily afford.
This mission opened their thinking to many approaches, which would never have
dawned upon them, had they merely continued as retailers. For example, Marks &
Spencer virtually became manufacturers on a country-wide scale, without having a
single factory of their own.
Example 2
And then there’s the classic story reported in the Harvard Business Review, many
years ago about American Railroads, almost going out of business, because of the
advent of air travel and the risk this posed to railways, only because they had
conceived their business to be about
“railways” instead of about
“transport”.
Example 3
The Achievement Spectrum, in recognising that its business extended far beyond
the presenting of workshops and seminars, re-defined its mission and main
purpose of business in the following four-fold statement, as to:
o
Rekindle the notion that work is fun.
o
Restore learning experiences and a
sense of self-fulfilment in the workplace
o
Reinstate a sense of commitment and
personal growth in the work situation by cultivating a sense of ownership, in
every employee.
o
Promote work as a universal source of
satisfaction for every human need.
In the words of Peter Drucker:
Thinking through what our
business is, by itself, is not enough.
The underlying definition of the business, and of its purpose and
mission, has to be translated into objectives.
Otherwise they remain insight, good intentions and brilliant epigrams
which never become achievement.
It is crucial to have a clear, meaningful and inspirational definition of your
business & its purpose
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