Business of change: when the whole context in which you've existed changes, what do you do? The Managing Director of a family firm describes his experience.(Company overview)

OUR FAMILY firm was founded by my great-great-grandfather in the early 19th century. My forebears had a strong Christian ethos, and this had significant consequences for the company when, in the 1930s, my grandfather accepted the challenge to let the Methodist faith, which he proclaimed and practised on a Sunday, affect the way he ran the company from Monday to Saturday.

His first idea was to go back into the factory with his eyes open as if he were a stranger. He saw, for the first time, the men's real working conditions. There were no washing facilities. There was no canteen. The yard was dirty. There was no sick pay. There was little or no pension provision.

So, in an experiment of faith, he began to change these things. He built washing and canteen facilities, introduced sick pay and persuaded all the shareholders to give some of their capital to set up a fund for the benefit of employees and their dependants. During the Depression he deliberately created work and took on staff.

This experience convinced my grandfather and father that what was morally right was economically viable. Over the next 60 years, the business achieved worldwide success based on quality, reliability, integrity and service. They saw the firm as a model for how relations between shareholders, management and employees could be, a working example of an alternative to industrial conflict and class war.

I came into the business in 1982, straight from university, with various unspoken, and even unconscious, assumptions. Among these were:

* that life would go on for our company and for me as it had done before.

* that there would always be a business to run, markets to support us and a job for life for everybody employed in the company.