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A report is ‘out of date’ the second it is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cling to outdated methodology?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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