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Widthwise 2020: Comment
On purpose
Are you on the right side of history? It’s not a question that the people who own and/or run wide-for- mat print providers are used to asking
themselves. It’s true that vast majority of the industry’s managers are in it for the long-term, rather than seeking a quick and unsustainable profit. Yet many, asked to define the purpose of their business, would struggle to do so.
In part, this reflects an instinctive aversion to the kind of high-flown rhetoric too many companies use to define their ‘purpose’. It is also true that different people launch or run businesses for different reasons and with different aims. Often, the spur may be the simple conviction that you can do a better job than your present employer. Not every company is founded to save the world but it
is possible, nevertheless, to manage a print service provider in such a way as to be as fair as possible to customers, suppliers, staff and the local community.
Indeed, that may be a more productive and useful approach than spending hours crafting a statement of purpose. As Giles Gibbons, who founded the consultancy Good Business in 1994, told ‘Management Today’ recently: “Purpose isn’t advertising. Nor is it a marketing statement. It needs to be an organising idea. Very few people go into the world trying to be bad. That isn’t to say bad things don’t happen. But the best businesses are open and engaged. They know they won’t please everybody but they will try to do the right thing if they can.”
The good news for wide-format print providers, which tend to be SMEs, is that this approach to purpose does not require you to hire a consultant, force your entire management team to brainstorm for an
afternoon when they feel they have more important things to do, or to completely redesign your website around a new slogan designed to convince your stakeholders that you are on a mission to save the world.
The British charity and think tank Blueprint for Better Business has a succinct, no-nonsense definition of purpose. It con- sists of five principles: honesty and fairness when dealing with customers and suppliers; being a responsible and responsive employ- er; having a purpose that delivers long-term sustainable performance; being a good citizen and acting as a guardian for future generations. Few managing directors would argue with any of these principles in theory. The difficult bit is judging whether you put all of them into practice all of the time.
The question of purpose - the simple, but powerful query ‘Why does your company exist?’ - has been thrown into sharp relief by the Covid-19 pandemic. At a very basic
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