Mars' Five Principles
Born with polio, Frank C. Mars often found himself in his mother’s kitchen, where he kept busy helping her hand-dip chocolate. His passion for confections continued to blossom through 1911 when he started selling butter cream candies from his home. Shortly thereafter, Mars Candy Factory was opened and the company grew quickly from its family roots.
Mars' Five Core Principles
Quality: Quality is the first ingredient of quality brands. The consumer is our boss, quality is our work and value for money is our goal.
Responsibility: All associates are asked to take direct responsibility for results, to exercise initiative and judgment, and to make decisions as required.
Mutuality: A mutual benefit is a shared benefit and a shared benefit will endure.
Efficiency: Use resources to the full capacity, waste nothing and do only what we can do best in order to maximize productivity.
Freedom: We need freedom to shape our future and profit to remain free. Family ownership was a deliberate choice.
Since its inception, Mars has focused on five core principles: Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency, and Freedom (see sidebar for detailed explanation). Seen as a competitive differentiator and an essential ingredient in the company’s success, these principles guide Mars, its strategy and its culture. They shape how employees, customers and brands are treated, and keep the company focused, especially important in times of growth. The Mars family members embodied these principles and worked to ingrain them into associates worldwide.
However, the company faced several challenges as it matured. First, as the third generation of family members who were leading the business retired , it became increasingly difficult to ensure that the guiding principles were strongly embedded throughout the organization. With the impending leadership transition, the corporate culture was in danger of extinction. There was a need to more formally communicate what made Mars unique and to describe how the founding principles were to be implemented to help the business achieve its strategic goals.
Other challenges included the diminishing talent pipeline and continued decentralization at Mars, with employees advancing to managerial roles and assuming accountability for running local operations. Recruited internally, these managers largely had no experience of running a business. The organization needed to equip them with the skills and knowledge required to lead their units effectively.
Lastly, learning initiatives were fragmented and disorganized. An internal Mars audit revealed that over nine different programs were being used to teach the core values. Numerous learning methods, vendors, and tools were used throughout the company and there was variety in the quality and content of materials employed, leading to inconsistency. There was also duplication of effort, with two parallel programs run by functional competency and learning and development teams.
“There was quite a lot of overlap in our learning programs,” recalls Lynn Davis, Mars University Effectiveness Manager. “In some cases, there was even complete disagreement between the two different streams.”
Change was needed. When Paul Michaels took the helm as President of Mars Incorporated, he advocated for a corporate university as the solution to the abovementioned issues. Not only would learning initiatives be streamlined and optimized, but the ongoing training would bolster the leadership pipeline and help the company continue to attract the industry’s best and brightest.