Assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies must fit reality.
The assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies must fit reality. When four penniless young men from Manchester, England—Simon Marks and his three brothers-in-law—decided in the early 1920s that a humdrum penny bazaar should become an agent of social change, World War I had profoundly shaken their country’s class structure. It had also created masses of new buyers for good-quality, stylish, and inexpensive merchandise such as lingerie, blouses, and stockings—Marks and Spencer’s first successful product categories. Marks and Spencer then systematically set to work developing brand-new and unheard-of core competencies. Until then, the core competency of a merchant was the ability to buy well. Marks and Spencer decided that it was the merchant, rather than the manufacturer, who knew the customer. Therefore, the merchant, not the manufacturer, should design the products, develop them, and find producers to make the goods to his design, specifications, and costs. This new definition of a merchant took five to eight years to develop and make acceptable to traditional suppliers, who had always seen themselves as “manufacturers,” not “subcontractors.”
ACTION POINT: What new assumptions about its environment, mission, and core competencies were made by Marks and Spencer?
Managing in a Time of Great Change
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker