Mars Inc gets the purpose v profit balance right

home of Mars Inc is Slough, an unprepossessing town somewhere under the flight path to London’s Heathrow Airport. It is not a place that sweet dreams are made of. It serves as the British backdrop for Ricky Gervais’s “The Office”. It is also the place where Forrest Mars, in the Depression of the 1930s, came up with two business ideas and a management philosophy that are still quietly shaping the world today.The creation story of the Mars Bar is well known. In 1920s Chicago, Forrest Sr, as he is now remembered, met his estranged father, a struggling chocolatier, over a malted milk, and came up with the brainwave of pouring malted milk chocolate as filling into a candy bar. Thus was the Milky Way born. But Forrest Sr, as irascible as he was enterprising, fell out with his father, left America and ended up in Slough. There, he rechristened the Milky Way as the Mars Bar. At a time when people needed calories at low cost, it took off. With brands like &s, Mars, based since 1974 in McLean, Virginia, is now the world’s biggest confectioner.