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Innovative Actions Programe Workshops
Knowledge and Information - 14th March 2006
This session was designed around the theme of how the use of company knowledge and information has a strategic as well as an operational dimension. It also has to designed, captured, disseminated, evaluated and updated if the company is to maximise its success.
Family business speaker: Dr Maitland Mackie CBE, Mackie’s of Scotland Ltd
Mackies today is the outcome of the effort and foresight of four generations of Mackie's and their staff. Ice cream is currently the main focus of the business - employing 70 people and producing over 5 million Litres of luxury ice cream a year. Each Maitland as an entrepreneurial innovator has, in his own way, contributed to the development of the business.
Doctor Maitland secured and delivered a substantial farm to each of his six children. Sir Maitland was the first to diversify the developing dairy farming into milk retailing in Huntly and Aberdeen. This activity was started in the late 30s and was subsequently sold to form the core of Kennerty Farm Dairies in 1964.
The present Chairman, Maitland restarted milk retailing with the purchase of several rural milk rounds as its core in the late '60s. He also began to make ice cream. In was in 1986 that the kernel of what is now Mackies as it is today was added.
Mackies vision is to be a Scottish global brand from the greenest company in Britain created by people having fun.
Maurice Smith
Co-Director of a new organisation The Vision Works, Maurice has more than 25 years experience as a journalist specialising in business, as an executive with the BBC and in running his own businesses. He is also the author of ‘Great Scots in Family Business’.
Maurice’s new venture ‘The Vision Works’ aims to help companies and public sector organisations see the “big picture”, help them build their reputations and business networks and create a sustainable competitive advantage. The Vision Works will be a sister company to Maurice’s other business TVI, which offers public relations and strategy advice to businesses specialising in leading-edge technology.