When the Top-line becomes again more important than Bottom-line: purpose first!

Many know from Simon Sinek the famous three golden circle stating that the why should preced the how and the what. The Harvard Businee Review re-addressed this idea in the last September article “put purpose at the core of your strategy”.

In their last research, it shows that purpose played two important roles: it helped companies to redefine their playing field and allowed them to reshape their value proposition.

An example from pet-food industry: Nestlé Purina stays “Better with pets” while Mars Petcare stays “a better world for pets”. Readers might argue it is just a semantic intellectual battle. But with this self definition, Mars entered the pet health industry, starting with a Pet Hospital and prolonging with an acquisition in the vetenary market with AniCura becoming the largest and fastest growing business division while Purina was narrowing in developing products only in pet food.

An other example with Sweden Securitas AB offering physical guarding services with 370.000 employees. By reviewing their purpose as “contributing to safer society”, they enlarged to more pro-active predictive services with customised electronic security solutions encompassing physical but also remote guardening, electronic security and even risk management increasing their revenue from 2012 to 2018 by 20%.

At Krauthammer we help companies to define their mission by chazing what would the market miss if your company wouldn’t exist till we find differentiators in the way we do business. We have ourselves as a mission “Bring Out the Best in People” to which we added recently “with an extra Smile from within” to better address “the Heart of Engagement” since we observed that engagement was often leading to draining people…

To echo the HBR, what about your own company?

-       Does your top-line purpose contributes to your company growth and core value proposition?

-       Does your top-line purpose significantly influence your strategic decisions and investments?

-       Does your top-line purpose shapes the agenda of the leadership team?

The smartest way to reconcile fluidly Top-line and Bottom-line…