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Thought Challenge 5-31-13
The D&D Daily e-Newsletter for the LP & Safety Industry
 


 


The challenge is ‘change’ in all its many faces and how open to change you are?

By Francis Clark
VP Business Development
Profitect

I was once told ‘you’re either an agent of change, or you will be changed by the coming changes and you won’t like it.’

An example presented to me was “how many ways can you drive into or arrive at work ‘if’ something happened to close your favorite route?” I experimented and for the next week, all 5 days, I forced myself to find a different way into work. Did it help? Yes, I found that I had no idea what made up the neighborhoods around my store which helped me to appreciate my immediate customer base. It also showed me that there is a need to experiment, get out of my comfort zone on a regular basis so that I don’t become complacent.

Even back then, and a very long time ago, ‘reports’ were the way that we operated the business. Today, we don’t need to rely on reports with all the technology changes in the past years...or even year. Yet when I speak with retailers, we still drive our business with reports!

I’m told there is a very large retailer in London that has one meeting room where there are spreadsheets papered like wallpaper all around the room (called the ‘war room’) and the CEO hold court there ‘amongst the reports’.

I speak to retailers all the time that are generating ‘new reports’! Watched an advert that was so proud that they could produce reports ‘on the fly’! And yet, I know of no store manager that is just drooling to get to work in the morning to see his ‘new report’!

A report is ‘out of date’ the second it is generated, fact. We have taken reports from paper to computer screen to our iPads and ‘that’s change?’ We allow the viewer to rank columns, move columns, perform various math functions between columns and data elements and call that ‘change’...but they are still reports.

We have some very sophisticated retailers using exception reports who are quite proud that the information gleaned from them is 75% useful and yet in the most lenient grading system that would be a ‘C’. Are we threatened by changing the way we run our business and that is why we cling to outdated methodology? Other industries have moved on using real time ‘answers’ to drive business change.

Why aren’t we producing ‘answers’ instead of more reports?
 



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Thought Challenge 5-31-13
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