Evolving Our Purpose

It’s popular these days for companies to say they’re customer-centric or that they put their customers first. At Lockheed Martin, we’ve been doing that for decades. We’re committed to understanding our customers’ missions better than any other company, helping us to provide solutions to their most complex challenges.

We’ve always shared our customers’ goals, helping them achieve their missions and prepare for threats. Now, we’re taking this concept further.

Lockheed Martin has a 21st Century Security vision with a goal of helping our customers go from defense to deterrence, from proactive to predictive. We are working toward transforming from a platform-centric company to one that infuses digital technology into everything we do. We see a future that consists of interoperable platforms, with 5G and commercial technology integrated throughout to bring advanced networking technologies into the defense sector.

As I shared recently on the PRWeek podcast, this new vision prompted us in Communications to consider: how can we help position Lockheed Martin so that our stakeholders understand this new approach? How can we demonstrate that we’re not changing the core of who we are and what we do; we’re updating how we solve our customers’ problems?

We’re helping them to be more than prepared, more than ready. So we’re stating our purpose in a new way and infusing it throughout our communications: ensuring those we serve always stay Ahead of Ready.

Ahead of Ready means we’re innovating with urgency. We are leveraging existing commercial technologies and increasing the capabilities of existing platforms. Collaborating with companies like Microsoft, Verizon and NVIDIA allows us to enhance commercially available technology with military-grade network and transmission security. This gives our customers improved communications abilities and access to data anywhere in the world so they can make real-time decisions faster.

Our very purpose is ensuring customers stay Ahead of Ready, no matter the domain – land, sea, undersea, air, space and cyber. Looking at all we’ve helped our customers achieve and everything we’re working toward, I’m so impressed by the work our teams do each day: we’re an industry leader for a reason. Around the world, we have 114,000 employees – 60,000 of them engineers, scientists and technologists – helping our customers deter the threats of today and tomorrow.

I am proud to be one member of this incredible global team. In a constantly changing world, it can be hard to know what new challenge is coming, but we’ll ensure our customers are always ready for what’s ahead... and then some.