The Book of Involvement tells the inside story of our business in 48 pages to our customers and anyone else who’s interested. You can order it for free and read it over your bowl of cornflakes in the morning.
But it started off less grandly… A decade ago someone knocked a booklet together purely for our own use detailing what’s important to the people in our organisation. The leaflet is now in i
ts 12th edition, has grown a bit in size and looks a bit nicer, but it will still fit in our back pockets. It’s still the most important document we have in our company, more important than contracts of employment! You’re welcome to see this too. Just click here.
The business is about making money – stupid
It’s sad, I think, that the idea of Purpose and Values has become rather cheapened, almost a cliché. They’re things every ‘thinking’ business just has to have. A feel-good box to tick and put up in reception in neon. A global industry has grown up around helping you to define them, but then they head off into the sunset and leave you to work it out for yourselves. And there have been well-known cases of very large corporates looking pretty silly for adopting grand and noble statements about your Values, then behaving rather differently.
This has been highlighted recently in the battle between sub-postmasters and The Post Office/Fujitsu. On the Post Office website they talk about their Purpose as being “We’re here, in person, for the people who rely on us.” A particular empty and hollow statement which hasn’t aged well. Did they think about this when they were prosecuting hundreds of post-masters?
Futijsu’s Purpose on their website is stated as: “Our purpose is to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation” – What is that supposed to even mean?
Under its Value of Aspiration it says that Fujitsu will “Stay curious and learn from failures and experiences.” Under its Value of Trust it says Fujitsu will “Act with ethics, transparency and integrity.” What do you think of these statements?
So – get rid of them? Move on? Time for something new? No. Time instead to reconnect with them, because they certainly wouldn’t be where they are today if they were living their Values.
Why we do this.
I’m going to unashamedly add to the internet’s squillion words on the subject because I and the team remain convinced that ‘why we do this’ is more important inside the business than ‘what we do’ or ‘how we do it’. Simon Sinek famously talks about this elsewhere! But allow me to bring it right down to earth, with our own story…
Before Involvement diversified into pallet storage and fulfilment, IT and Design, and – coming very soon – the UK manufacture of tinplate products, ‘all’ we’d done for 40 years was to source, store and deliver packaging products into UK industrial markets. We were doing well-enough. But if you asked people here why we did it, they’d most likely say ‘to make money – stupid!’.
Ask the same question today and you’ll get a very different answer which is ‘to deliver our customers’ products and services to market with confidence’. It still doesn’t sound at all glamorous. It doesn’t stop customers in their tracks in reception. We don’t use it as an advert. But agreeing, and more importantly, taking to heart this straightforward statement has transformed us in amazing ways. We’ve massively expanded our reach, our ambitions and the opportunities we can offer and our results, well, they speak for themselves.
The best test of your commitment to your Purpose and Values is a crisis
Plenty of challenges have come along in the last few years to put our purpose and values to the test and show if they’re still worth having.
When I woke up on March 23rd 2020 to the reality of the first national lockdown, like most business owners I spent the next 24 hours worrying whether we’d even have a company in 12 months.
We ended up thriving. That was because we knew precisely what to do.
We had a clear purpose. We had our North Star. We were aligned around our values. We needed to keep our supply lines open and our deliveries flowing. With confidence. Giving our customers one less thing to worry about. Concentrate everything on that. Pivot quickly. Do it now, now, now. Keep everyone focussed on delivering.
This was the biggest big test of our beliefs and how committed we really were to them. Not the last though.
Brexit. Interest rates. Inflation. Raw Material Shortages. Politics… Tell me about it.
As we speak, life for us today is all about guaranteeing 100% availability of our core stock lines. And there is no end or limit to the lengths we will go to make this happen.
It’s the reason we are about to start manufacturing, in Manchester, our own tin packaging so we don’t have to worry about challenges to supply lines from Europe of this in-demand, sustainable product range.
Deliver with confidence. That’s it. End of.
If you’re struggling to define your purpose, you’re probably trying too hard
How do you do it?
As I’ve said, we aren’t looking for a clever slogan here. It’s a gut thing, not a Powerpoint presentation or the latest output from the Comms Team.
You need to make this real and normal. Don’t talk about it in an abstract way, like you’re some mythical idealised organisation.
It definitely mustn’t be corporate boll*cks. People are naturally sceptical. Invite them to an away-day to define your purpose and values and they’ll think: ‘Oh yeah here we go. This is going to be a load of fluffy nonsense. Where’s the bar?’
My experience is that you’ll find the people in the business already know the answers.
What do you believe in?
What’s important to you around here?
What matters beyond making a profit?
You can do it in a day, or a couple of mornings or afternoons.
I would go further and say it’s the DUTY of every employer to provide meaning and purpose beyond a paycheck. It is your people’s RIGHT. If it was me, I’d make it the law.
