What is Our Business?

Drucker (1973) said the first responsibility of top management is to answer the question "What is our business?" (78) He wrote about the following successful responses:

Sears’s, under General Wood, was moving from being a seller to being a buyer. Under his successors, Sears has redefined itself as a maker for the American family. Increasingly the emphasis is on Sears as the informed, responsible producer who designs for the American family the things it needs and wants.

General Wood took Sears into automobile insurance. His successors have added property insurance of all kinds. They have added a mutual fund to serve the new mass-capital market. They have gone into the travel business, and so on. In other words, Sears no longer defines its business as goods. It is defined as the needs, wants, and satisfactions of the American middle-class family.(55)

One of the earliest and most successful answers was worked out by Theodore N. Vail (1845-1920) for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (also known as the Bell System) almost seventy years ago: "Our business is service." (77)

To broaden its capital base, Wall Street firm Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette (DLJ) decided in the sixties that "Our business is to provide financial services, financial advice, and financial management to the new 'capitalists'—the institutional investors such as pension funds and mutual funds." (87)

Four brothers-in-law (Simon Marks, Israel Sieff, Harry Sacher, and Norman Laski) decided that the business of Marks & Spencer was not retailing. It was social revolution. (96)

Hmm. So many possibilities come to mind. It seems that I've got a long weekend ahead of me, but after 20 years of pondering this question, I should come up with a plausible answer—an official all-in answer.