Finding one story for many businesses

What do hydraulic piling hammers, air traffic control rooms, radio frequency-blocking glazing, road construction equipment, marine diesel engines and plastic injection moulding have in common?

In this case, they are all made by businesses belonging to the same British engineering and manufacturing group.

Over many years, the family-owned organisation had grown into a remarkably diverse collection of specialist companies serving markets around the world. But what connected businesses doing such extraordinarily different things?

The question arose as the group returned to private ownership after a period as a PLC, alongside changes to its structure, leadership and strategy. The individual businesses had strong identities, specialist expertise and their own ways of working. Nobody wanted to iron those differences out. We needed to find the Essential Truths that sat above them.

Senior leaders talked about quality, professionalism, pride in a good job well done and performance, but also about innovation, better communication and the need for the businesses to work together more. People across the businesses, along with clients and external partners, then told us stories about the group at its best.

At a time when British manufacturing was often characterised as being in decline, here was an organisation demonstrating world-class technical expertise across an extraordinary range of capabilities. There was enormous pride in the work and considerable respect from customers and partners.

There were differences too, of course. We had to find what people genuinely shared without pretending that businesses making marine engines and specialist glazing ought to have identical cultures.

From all of that came a new story for a diverse engineering and manufacturing group united by bold ambition, building on its heritage, investing in innovation and people and championing British engineering around the world.

Five principles supported it:

• We thrive on challenge.
• We innovate by design.
• We keep it simple.
• We deliver exceptional results.
• We go further together.

The work was challenged and refined with senior leaders and the Chair before being unanimously approved, with the intention that it would shape recruitment, development, sales, innovation and the way the businesses worked together.

For the first time, this extraordinary collection of companies had an answer to the question we had started with: what do all these businesses have in common?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.