|
 |
|
|
| Home > From the President |
|
 |
|
June 2008
In the last letter I mentioned our using the human brain as a symbol of our renewed commitment to becoming a solutions provider to the global supply chain. When people ask me what that brain of ours is thinking about, I tell them we’re thinking about change. We’re thinking about what the future will bring and exactly where we intend to fit in.
A lot of people still think that the strongest survive. That’s nonsense. The future belongs to those who can see change coming and adapt to it before it hits. It’s the power of business agility in today’s global economy. At WPSS, our challenge is to insure sustainability so we can be around this time next year, and also this time next century.
We have a lot of stakeholders to be aware of when we consider the future. Certainly our customers. Certainly our distributors. But we also need to understand the impact of an ever-changing world on our suppliers, our neighbors and our customer’s customers.
If we make a decision that is bad for the environment, we endanger the well-being of those people who buy the products our customers put on our shelves. So it is to everybody’s best interest that we embrace clean-tech as we did in the way we apply finishes to our products. If we have to wait an extra day to send a full truckload across the country rather than two half loaded trucks, it’s in our best interest to conserve fuel by waiting that extra day.
It makes strong business sense to try to reduce the carbon footprint of our products, because some day soon our biggest customers are going to be basing their buying decisions on carbon footprints as well as price points. Wal-Mart (at 2% of our GNP) is already heading down that road.
Our brains are already working overtime to think about the changes technology will make on the materials we use and the ways in which our business will be changed. It’s a lot to think about. But it’s what we have to do, now that we are a company that uses it’s head for a living. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
