Are you a retailer, and have you hit rock bottom? Pain, sorrow, anguish, and confusion? Omni Talk’s Retailers Anonymous 12-Step program is here to help.
Intro
One of my favorite movies growing up was the Music Man. I loved watching Robert Preston serenade Ma Partridge in the library, seeing Ron Howard lisp lustfully about the Wells Fargo wagon, and, most especially, I loved singing along to Ya Got Trouble.
If you have never heard or fully appreciated the song, here is a clip of it below:
You see, trouble is exactly what we have right now in the retail industry, my friends. Oh, most certainly we got trouble. Right here in Retail City. It starts with “T.” It rhymes with “E.” And, that stands for e-commerce!
That stands for e-commerce!
Actually, technically, it stands for the confluence of e-commerce, mobile technology, urbanization, and the rise of the millennial generation, but I think Buddy Hackett would literally have gone apoplectic if I tried to fit that into a song, so let’s keep it easy (though Buddy did somehow handle Shipoopi).
Let’s instead just use shorthand and call it what it really is . . . Amazon.
Amazon has shaken us to our core. Amazon is the apex predator, the perfect eating machine, like the shark in Jaws, and all it does is “swim, eat, and make other baby sharks.”
But there is hope. There really is. We don’t have to succumb to apathy. There is a program that can work for us.
It is called Retailers Anonymous. In just 12 easy steps, you too can be on the road to recovery.
In this long-form post, we will explore these 12 steps together because you should not have to go it alone. Our leaders have made the bed, but you should not have to lie in it.
Come along with us and take solace in knowing that help will soon be on the way.
Retailers Anonymous – A 12-Step Recovery Program
Step 1 — Admit There is a Problem
Amazon for the past decade and a half has been the retail industry’s Dien Bien Phu.
For those unfamiliar, Dien Bien Phu was the famous battle in Vietnam that occurred between the French and the Viet Minh in 1954. It was the battle that drove the French out of Vietnam. Despite extreme French cockiness about their military superiority, the French lost the battle handedly.
Flash forward twelve years later, in 1966, and noted author Bernard Fall wrote of this battle in his book, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. Fall’s thesis was simple — the United States, or anyone else for that matter, had no chance of winning a war in Vietnam. Unless the U. S. was willing to learn the lessons the French had learned — i.e. “not to underestimate the guerrilla or overestimate U.S. air power, and above all to secure the support of domestic opinion” — the U.S. did not stand a chance.
Essentially, in Fall’s mind, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, more than 20 years before the fall of Saigon, was the writing on the wall. The Viet Minh was so willing to do anything — to tunnel through mountains, to carry heavy artillery through hell and back, etc. — that no outside culture stood a chance of destroying the Viet Minh’s nationalistic pride.
Dien Bien Phu is therefore the perfect analogy for Amazon’s “below the radar” ascension. Quietly, Amazon has built its own tunnels and moats. They have won the war on retail already.
The only hope left is to survive.
Yet retailers still refuse to admit this. We still hear legacy retailers claim Amazon’s not their competition or see them pay little heed to anything happening around them within e-commerce. Say “Alibaba” and some of them even think you may be talking about a new Disney movie.
Well, I have news for you. If the leaders of your retail company are still claiming Amazon is not your competition, if they are still looking at bricks-and-mortar players as your main competition vs. e-commerce players like Wayfair and others, or if they don’t know who the hell Alibaba is, it is time for you to demand that they make like Cougar in Top Gun, turn in their wings, and admit their shortcomings.
The only salvation is admitting there is a problem. It is the first step on the long road to recovery.
Step 2 — Be Humble and Admit You Don’t Have All the Answers
Or, said another way, Step 2 is Don’t Act like the Mayor in Jaws.
My favorite clip in Jaws is when the Mayor, Chief Brody, and Hooper are standing in front of a huge tourism billboard that has been vandalized with a painting of a shark fin creeping up behind a sunbather.
The scene is a classic study in cognitive bias. The Mayor, having already seen multiple people devoured by the perfect eating machine (insert Amazon analogy here), is paralyzed. He knows there is a problem, but he is afraid to admit that he doesn’t know how to solve the problem and refuses to ask for help because of the potential risk to his reputation. So, the shark problem continues to persist, ultimately no one wins, and he becomes the Mayor of Shark City.
Retail CEOs are dangerously close to becoming the Mayors of Shark City. Take this quote from outgoing Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren back at the early part of 2017:
“90% of what we sell at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s is still sold in a physical store . . . Lots of people don’t believe or understand that. I just wanted to point that out . . . if the department store did not exist today, there would be a group of smart people in Silicon Valley inventing the department store because it will serve a purpose.”
Damn, that’s smug. Smart people of Silicon Valley? Lots of people don’t believe or understand that?
Watch this clip of the referenced scene from Jaws and try to tell me Lundgren doesn’t sound eerily like the Mayor of Shark City.
Help from the “smart people of Silicon Valley” is exactly what retailers need. That is why I applaud Walmart for their recent moves and Nordstrom for their attempt to take their company private to sort everything out.
None of this is easy. The legacy retailer leaders of today, with their 20 to 30 years of experience seeing the world one way, before the dawn of Amazon, may not have the playbook to get them out of the muck. Not only can the “smart people of Silicon Valley” help, but more frighteningly, they may also be the same people to swim up and bite every current retailer we know and love right in the ass.
Step 3 — Shift Your Context
It is perfectly understandable that retail’s current crop of leaders may not have the right frame of mind to solve the problems in front of them. It comes down to a psychological phenomenon called neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the idea that the older we are and the more we experience things happening a certain way, the more difficult it is for our brains to retrain themselves to adjust to new contexts.
Neuroplasticity is best exemplified by the work of nearly 40-year-old engineer Dustin Sendin (seen below in this video).
Essentially, if you don’t have time to watch the video, Sendin reversed engineered a bicycle so that if he wanted to turn his bike to the left, he had to turn the handle bars to the right. Total mind blow, right?
But here’s where it gets interesting.
It took Sendin eight months of consistent daily practice to learn how to ride his bike. Sendin next gave the bike to his eight-year-old son. Guess how long it took his son to learn to ride the bike?
Only two weeks!
Omnichannel retail is the equivalent of Sendin’s reverse-engineered bicycle. The omnichannel bike is far different from the brick-and-mortar experiences, and even the e-commerce experiences, that we all have come to know and love. Bricks-and-mortar just has a longer history than e-commerce. Both are wired into our brains a certain way.
Future success requires that we shift our context and learn how to ride a newly engineered omnichannel bike.
Step 4 — Swing a Bigger “P”
One of the reasons it is difficult for the current crop of retail leaders to shift their context and to ride the omnichannel bike is that they not only have an Amazon denial problem, but they also have a Product Problem.
For centuries, the word “product” within retail was synonymous with the products on retailers’ shelves — e.g. towels, sheets, deodorant, etc.
Retailers have historically been led by merchants whose sole job has been to pick and curate products better than the next guy. So, not surprisingly, this strategy is still the current Student Body Right playbook for retailers — “as long I pick and curate product better than my competition, I can win.”
This belief worked before the dawn of e-commerce, before Amazon and others made the entire product selection of the free world available at the press of the button, but now it has become massively problematic.
The answer to this problem still lies in the word “product,” but in the capitalized form, as in Product Management. Product Management is a discipline that the “smart people of Silicon Valley,” Amazon, and many other e-commerce players understand quite well.
Legacy retailers? Not so much.
Product management is the intersection of User Experience Design, Technology, and Business.
Retailers are not in the business of products. Manufacturers and CPGs are. Retailers are in the business of Product Management. A brand, a store, an e-commerce portal — the collection of them all, if you happen to be a true omnichannel retailer — that is a retailer’s actual Product.
Whether you are Louis Vuitton or Kohl’s, your Product is not the product inside your four walls, but rather your Product is the collective experiences, feelings, and emotions that your store connotes, with your store (and your e-commerce portal) simply being individual tools in your toolbox to elicit emotions in your customers.
It is time for retailers to start thinking like digitally-trained Product Managers. It is time for them to start leading with their big “P’s.”
Step 5 — Take Stock of Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Once we have admitted the problem and shifted our context to start thinking about a retailer’s brand as the real Product being sold to consumers, it is time to do a serious diagnostic check of just how prepared your company is to handle the tasks it will soon face.
I have created a simple rubric for CEOs, leaders, and any individual within retail to help evaluate just how full of baloney their company and their leaders might be. I call it . . .
The Asinine Things You Don’t Want to Hear a Retailer Say
Proprietary Product is Our Panacea
The Phrase “Digital Strategy”
The Word “Curation”
Prioritization Requires Us to Narrow Our Scope
Innovation Should Come from the Core
We are Excited about a New Tech Idea We Launched Last Week
We Measure Traffic by Transactions
The Word “Holistic”
You are almost halfway through the recovery program already, so let’s Price is Right speed round this one . . .
Proprietary Product is Our Panacea — Ok. But are you going to sell this proprietary product online? Good luck not degrading the margin of your current business model. I sure hope you have something else in the hopper.
The Phrase “Digital Strategy” — There is no such thing as a “digital strategy.” Digital needs to be woven into everything a company does. It is a given. Talking about digital disjointedly is a tell that a company has no idea what it is doing (also see the above section about Product Management).
The Word “Curation” — Seriously? You are a retailer. It is your job to pick product for your stores, your website, your whatever. Don’t even dare think curation means fewer items by default either. Then we might come to blows.
Prioritization Requires Us to Narrow Our Scope — Nope. You can be broadly focused and prioritized. See Amazon. It is a natural psychological response, when you don’t have a clue what the f*ck is going on, to want to narrow things down to get control of them, but that does not make it right.
Innovation Should Come from the Core Business — Run into any good typewriter businesses lately?
We are Excited about a New Tech Idea We Launched Last Week — “Thanks for letting me know,” said the competition. Maybe it is better to keep things quiet until you at least know the significance of what you have?
We Measure Traffic as Transactions — Of course, it doesn’t make sense to try to bring e-commerce funnel statistics and analytics into physical operations. Why would anyone want to do that (said sarcastically)?
The Word Holistic — Often said as, “We need a holistic omnichannel strategy.” It is like that old Seinfeld line, “Why do I need Extra Strength Tylenol? Is Strength not enough?” The word “holistic” is a poker-like tell that leaders are not confident in the coordination of their strategies going forward.
(Breathe)
You may think I am joking, but the above statements can be heard frequently on earnings calls, at conventions, and around the water coolers. Until a company scores 0 out of 10 on all the above, it is not ready to move to Step 6 in the recovery program.
Step 6 — Embrace the New Flywheel of Omnichannel Retail
Amazon has it business model flywheel (see below courtesy of the Motley Fool). It is a flywheel predicated upon selection, one that we cannot and should not try to duplicate. Frankly, I am not sure anyone should go head to head with it, even Walmart, though I sure am excited to see Douglas and Marc try, whether that is their ultimate plan or not (Dien Bien Phu anyone?).
No, instead we need a new flywheel — a flywheel that enables us to compete AND to coexist with Amazon for the long-term. We need a flywheel that is the retail equivalent of Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding, Jr. flying around, Outbreak style, in a chopper to find a monkey that has the antibodies to inoculate us all from the infection that is Amazon.
Well, here is that flywheel:
First, the thing to point out, right in the center, is that success is no longer measured by sales and profits. Dollars invested into and on behalf of the community in the form of new businesses, employment, etc. should be added to the equation. What keeps me up at night, and why I am so impassioned in my tone is that if retailers don’t figure out how to recover and stave off the Amazon virus, many of us will find ourselves displaced, and many locales will be hit especially hard.
Second, the new flywheel of retail is built upon data. Data will create better brand experiences, whether in store, online, at home, or wherever. These experiences will drive traffic to the brand, and, ultimately, just the act and success of doing this will pique the interest of other parties, and those parties will join in the fray, share data, and then the same brand experiences will be enriched even further.
Third, in the background and similarly to Amazon, the cost structure and the pricing schemes will continue to add fuel to the flywheel.
Now allow me to paint a picture, using this model, of the possible future.
With data at the heart of a new retail, we can envision a world where one’s mobile phone or even one’s voice acts as the remote control for one’s physical exploration of life. We can envision a world where physical movement can become the analog of a Google search term in your browser. We can envision a world where retail becomes like a morph of a video game and a casino — celebrating the “why” in why you come to a physical place to shop.
Keep going with me a little more.
Every interaction within a store, whether it be with products, with sales associates, with fixtures, etc. will be recorded, manipulated, or used to give customers the experiences and connections they desire. This is at the core of what Amazon’s mobile app scan capability is all about (video demo here).
Data will make every retail experience behave like a multi-player video game — the customer will be the main-player character, and everything around that customer, within the entire world, will function real-time, interactively like a non-player character in the game, and each of these non-player characters will read, react, and respond to the in-the-moment needs of the main-player character, the customer.
If you think I am joking, believe me I am not. This Minority Report sh*t is real, and it is coming. If you don’t have the stomach for it, don’t even think about attempting the next step in the program.
Step 7 — Dive into the Omnichannel Ecotone of Research and Development
Once you buy into the new flywheel of retail, you should jump into it. I’m talking “Calgon Take Me Away” bathe in it.
Like noted retail savant Lionel Richie is fond of saying, “Life begins on the edge of your comfort zone” (it is pearls like this which is why Lionel is asked back to keynote ShopTalk every year).
But Lionel is exactly right. Lionel is describing what ecologists call an ecotone.
An ecotone is the point where two ecosystems or biomes intersect, like where a forest meets a grassy plain, for example. Ecotones are fascinating to ecologists because they are a petri dish for adaptation. Ecotones force species to adapt or die.
Species, acculturated to one climate, are, within ecotones, forced to interact with species of other climates. Ecotones therefore become the locus for biological transformation. They are evolutionary ground zero.
Or, said another way, ecotones are where species are forced to coexist and flourish at the “edge of their comfort zones.”
That’s where we are as an industry, at the edge of our comfort zone, sitting inside a new omnichannel retail ecotone.
As you can see from the above two circle Venn diagram, bricks-and-mortar retail and e-commerce retail have historically occupied two almost completely isolated ecosystems.
Now these two business model ecosystems are pressing against each other. They are about to merge into something we have never seen before. Both sides will be forced to adapt and the creature of that adaptation will be something novel, and, yes, even scary.
This IS scary. But there is still hope. A new model of retail can emerge, where physical locations are still pillars of importance for our communities, whether suburban or urban. A new model of retail can emerge that is powered by a different engine than we know today. A new model of retail can emerge that requires less working capital (i.e. through less inventory), that generates higher productivity (i.e. through automation and technology), and that brings traffic back to the store (i.e. through social and physically tangible experiences that cannot be simulated online).
We must dive head first into this new ecotone and start putting money towards exploratory initiatives in the form of Research and Development (R&D) so we can adapt as quickly as possible.
Step 8 — Exploit 5 Key Areas of Investment Priority
Retailers historically (for like hundreds of years) have not been accustomed to research and development. Once retailers found a model that worked, the idea was to scale your physical presence across the nation and internationally as fast as one could.
Amazon changed that for the industry. Amazon understands the value of R&D . . .
“. . . failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know the difference between baseball and business, however, baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
R&D is about risk and reward. The potential positive outcome, if found, far exceeds the gain from incremental change on “conventional wisdom.” Amazon understands this well, and that is why they already have a leg up on developing the first omnichannel ecotone success story (mark it down now — Whole Foods).
But Amazon will run into roadblocks as they learn how to merchandise and operate physical spaces for the first time. We still have time to catch up and forge something novel within the omnichannel ecotone.
Success will require a deep focus on five key points of intra and entrepreneurship. They are:
- Data — companies must make data their #1 priority if it is to be the center of the new retail flywheel. Specifically, they must get behind Product (big “P”) data to the lowest level and move quickly after cloud-based point-of-sale deployment and location tracking technologies.
- Molting — current bricks-and-mortar retailers need to shed the skin of their legacy physical store installations. Their shopping experiences are already in hospice. We are not talking about developing Macy’s 2.0 or Kohl’s 2.0 either (or more aptly named Kohl’s Octogenerian). We are talking about the development of completely new brand concepts that can be converted into existing footprints over time, as fast as possible, just like a snake does with its skin.
- New Distribution — retail within the new omnichannel ecotone will not be conducted solely within four walls or on a browser anymore. Efforts will be made to get as up close and direct with the consumer as possible. Everyone is doing it already — from Nike selling on Amazon, to Thrive Market thriving, to my personal favorite Lavar Ball, telling Nike to “sit on it Potsie.” The retailers that start to think about how to distribute their brands differently will be the ones venturing deep into the new ecotone.
- Supply Chain — new points of distribution will require never-before-seen flexibility in retailers’ supply chains. Depending upon the distribution point, retailers will need to ensure that their products are “ready-to-ship” or “ready-to-show.” Companies selling products that already have 10% e-commerce penetration or more and that do not have their products ready to ship (in eaches, via flatpack, etc.) are already drastically behind the eight ball.
- New Partnerships — partnerships are a key cog in the flywheel. Companies should be asking, “Can 1 + 1 = 3?” They should explore the “why” behind physical spaces and ask new questions about the likes of KinderCare, Food Trucks, Craigslist, Tinder, and Mailboxes, etc. to understand if partnerships with such companies could relieve pain for consumers in their already over-programmed lives.
Leveraging the above to understand the pain points of tasks that cannot be completed online, and the relationship of the “physical” to those tasks within the concept of the economy of one’s time will lead to new roads of discovery as the future of retail unfolds.
Step 9 — Set Guardrails to Ensure Success
Step 9 could possibly be the most important step within the entire program. It is the step that, if not tended too, could make many people’s hard work and good intentions go for naught.
Step 9 is about taking the time to set guardrails upfront for how your company will govern, monitor, and fertilize the soil from which your new business initiatives and innovation will sprout.
There are important questions to ask.
Questions like:
- Is everyone aligned on the R&D and new initiative spend floor as a percent of the planned annual budget?
- Is everyone aligned on the time horizon related to each new initiative?
- Have governance milestones and decision-making authority been clearly outlined throughout the entire organization across every new initiative?
- Does the entire company understand and uphold the importance of corporate secrecy surrounding every new initiative, especially the CEO?
- Have the new initiatives been set up to flourish either literally or figuratively as new business entities, outside the potential pull of corporate inertia?
- Have the team members on new initiatives been clearly informed of the upside and downside (i.e. the risk and the reward) of their potential innovation work? Have they received hazard pay on the downside and an equity share in the potential upside of something great?
- Has the organization created a culture where the innovation teams themselves have the power to decide when a project should stop, if necessary?
If a company can clearly answer all the above, with great alignment throughout the organization, then innovation has the fertile ground it needs to grow.
If, on the other hand, any of the above is unclear — i.e. if people don’t know who has final decision-making authority on projects, if budgetary commitments are not held, or if secrecy is not well-maintained, then the chance of your recovery effort succeeding is far lower.
You may be left with nothing more than a hope and a prayer to the Retailers Anonymous equivalent of the porcelain god.
Step 10 — Hire the Right People
Assuming you could answer the questions posed in Step 9 well, then the 10th step in the recovery program is to hire the right people, with the right intestinal fortitude, to survive the adaptive challenges within the omnichannel ecotone.
The genetic traits that will enable innovation to thrive are simple.
First, Curiosity. The old saying is that “curiosity killed the cat,” but if you examine the old proverb upon which this saying is based, and to which Shakespeare referenced in Much Ado about Nothing, the original saying is “care killed the cat,” with care in reference to “worry” or “sorrow” (thanks as always Wikipedia).
The original form of the proverb suits the current state of retail so much more than the saying we have all come to know today. Right now, it is the extreme caring and worry of sustaining the old mainline, retail business model that is killing the cat — constantly tending to its needs, tweaking it incrementally, etc.
Curiosity, on the other hand, is what will set us free.
Curiosity is a skill that is tough to teach. You either have it or you don’t. The people involved in your innovation efforts need to have it. They need to be innately interested in new technologies, in interdisciplinary applications within business, and in networking and meeting new people for the sake of learning, and not for the sake of getting something in return or for political gain.
Second, Founder Mentalities. Founders care deeply about their work. They care about their work almost as much as they care about their own children.
Founders also don’t ask for permission. They just do. Startup founders aren’t out surveying and asking their competition, “Are you ok if I start doing this in my company?” The mere thought of it is ridiculous.
But think about it. This is precisely how corporate bureaucracies function. It is ludicrous. Project leaders are expected to go to key people within their organizations and ask for “sign off” on their work. When in the real world does this happen? It doesn’t. It is cray-cray.
Third, The “Bounce” — Innovation projects are more likely to fail than they are to succeed. People on innovation teams need to be comfortable with this fact. They need to be comfortable pushing the boundaries of the possible even if it means an Icarus-like fall back down to Earth. It is a required mentality.
Often you hear business leaders at conferences say, “We are successful because we celebrate failure.” Horseshit. It is more nuanced than that. Any schmo can celebrate failure. And, who knew horseshit was one word? Seriously, I looked it up.
But I digress. We need to celebrate the mentality that follows the act of failing, not the act itself. We should celebrate if and only if we see people fail and then see those same people pick themselves right up off the ground and iterate on their failures immediately, in a way that mirrors a drug addiction. We need to celebrate people who react to failure like it is a dopamine hit or a heroine injection that leaves them jonesing to iterate on their work even faster, rather than wallow in despair about where they made mistakes or worry about other people’s perceptions of them.
It is a super crappy movie, but Bounce with Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow (when they were dating) is all about this. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I think there is even a scene where they cry in the shower together.
Fourth, Learning Agility — The Bounce drug effect, if left unchecked though, can be dangerous. That is why you also need to screen for learning agility. If you don’t screen for learning agility, you could wind up with some completely too far out of left field ideas, like selling ice to Eskimos.
Noted executive coach Kevin Cashman once told me, “Learning agility is the ability to succeed in first order conditions.”
As you hire, look consciously at who, within their track records, have succeeded when they have had a brand new task to tackle, with little or no previous experience.
Ask in screenings — are the candidates in front of us here because they drafted off the success of others or because of the success of the underlying businesses they were in? Or have they been successful by their own efforts?
If it is a yes to the former but not to the latter question, do not hire them.
Step 11 — Come to Grips with the Fact that Winning is the New Losing
The most overused term in retail or even in business is “winning.” I loathe it. Hearing it is like having to go to a party with Cal Berkeley graduates.
I have never understood the term because it is impossible to define. What’s the game we are trying to win? Over what time horizon are we playing the game too?
Retail and business are not like sport. There is not one winner and one loser at the end of a defined timeframe. If you believe the opposite, then tell me — did Sears win at one time? Did Walmart? Did Gap at the height of the khaki swing craze?
They all did well, but did they win? If they didn’t, then who did? It is a pointless question that does not have a real answer. Amazon may be “winning” now, but how and when in the future will we decide if they or others are still winning or if there are new winners in the future?
Simon Sinek sums it up best in the video below where he discusses finite vs. infinite games (it is a great watch if you have the time).
Simply put, winning is the new losing. Our industry leaders need to stop throwing the word around. Go to any conference, and you will hear the word thrown around in nearly every speech. It is a nothing term. Instead listen for a retailer’s purpose. That should be the guiding light.
Millennials understand the insanity of this word “winning” too. They don’t want to follow talking heads or to buy products from companies whose sole goal is a macho, undefined “winning.” They want to follow companies with a purpose, companies who place a far greater value on the impact they have within their communities than on the shorter-term ebbs and flows of a share price.
Step 12 — Foster a Culture of “Do”
The final step in recovery is about culture, just like AA is about spiritualism. Fostering a strong culture is what enables Steps 1 through 11 to take hold. It starts at the highest level and trickles down — from the Board of Directors, to the CEO, to middle management, and on down to the individual, even, to you, the reader, right from the beginning.
The recovery effort will only succeed if everyone is willing to hold themselves accountable to rolling up their sleeves and being doers.
Doers get shit done. They have objective track records of success. Operators jump from one opportunity to the next — they leave a trail of what looks like a successful track record of accomplishments on a resume, but as you double-click to understand their accomplishments further, you realize they have only been riding a tailwind without really doing anything significant.
Even worse than the operator is the foreign exchange student.
Yes, you know what I mean.
The foreign exchange student is someone on the surface who looks like a super cool outsider, but once you get to know him or her better, you realize he or she is not at all what you first thought.
It’s like in school. After a long summer break, along comes some strapping dude from a foreign country with an accent you and your classmates have never heard up close. He dresses to the nines, and is straight out of central casting. He coyly plays up the language barrier to his benefit (oh, he is so sensitive!), and then quickly every girl on campus is swooning over the new mysterioso about whom they really know nothing.
Flash forward two months later, and this same dude is sent packing because he turns out not to be sensitive at all, and instead he gets caught doing things he shouldn’t in the stairwell. True story.
It’s like Hank Azaria in Along Came Polly. Azaria’s Claude is hot but Debra Messing did not really want to spend the rest of her life with him.
Not to be flippant in any way, but it is the same with innovation efforts. Companies will scour places in Silicon Valley, like Facebook, Google, etc. — places that have a reputation for being innovative just for being tech companies — and try to find the person that looks the part. Hoodies, tattoos, piercings, and hair dye all get evaluated as positives during the screening process. So too does the volume of “tech speak.” Companies will sometimes even move candidates forward in their screening processes just according to how many “tech” words they do not understand and that get spouted off. The more the better in their minds.
Don’t be fooled! Just because you come from a tech company, especially if that company’s business model has pretty much been unchallenged (cough . . . Google), doesn’t make you innovative. Look instead for candidates internally and at companies across all industries that have reinvented themselves when their business models came under siege.
Look to the good guys that have the proven track records of doing. Hoodies and tattoos are fine — just don’t make them part of the selection criteria.
Operators and foreign exchange students are all over retail right now. It makes sense too. The former exists because the business model has been unchallenged for decades — they are the skilled “managers,” the people that understand the realpolitik of a retail organization. The latter exist because these same skilled managers are throwing “Hail Mary’s” to help them with the skills they don’t possess.
It is the cluster of all cluster you-know-what’s that we cannot let continue. The only way to break the cycle is to celebrate and to build a culture that holds people accountable to the Do.
Closing
The road to recovery is never easy. If you have read every part of this recovery program from beginning to end, then chances are you care like hell to see your company through the trials and tribulations that the industry will endure over the next five to ten years.
So, demand action on what you have read, not just from yourself, but more importantly from your leaders too. They get paid the big bucks to think through the complexity of the problems that face them, but there is a moral hazard in their roles as well.
Many of these leaders, in their 40s, 50s and 60s, are not thinking about the long game. Many of them are not “founders.” Neither is Wall Street.
While the inertia of activity rather than accomplishment might propel your leaders to incredible personal financial gain over the short-term, to the likes of which you and I will never see, just remember that their decisions cannot truly be validated until decades later.
Only years later will we be able to understand the impact that these leaders’ decisions have had on all the towns, both big and small, across America. Don’t let them off the hook. Demand that they think about the plan outlined above.
76 trombones and a big parade later, Robert Preston transformed River City. He helped the town to dream of band uniforms, piccolos, and trombones.
The next wave of Music Men and Women is out there.
It is up to us to find them to lead the band.
Be careful out there,
Chris
P.S. I dedicate this post to one of my earliest professional mentors and best bosses I have ever had, Jennifer Go. Jen — We are thinking about you and keeping you in our thoughts and prayers.
Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.