You're Not the Boss of Me

OCTOBER 31, 2010

You’re Not the Boss of Me Skip to content Home About Me About This Blog ← The Language of Leadership in the 21st Century. They stifle creativity and innovation. From this perspective, I think it safe to say that the work of leadership includes breaking rules.

Maturity 50

Maturity Blog Merchandising McCarthy 50

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 6, 2014

If round after round of profit warnings was not enough – group operating profits fell 20% between 2011 and 2013 and are likely to fall another 30% in 2014 — the company recently announced it had overstated its first-half profit by about $400 million. Troubles at Tesco, the UK’s leading retailer, are mounting. How did this happen?

Retail 11

Retail Merchandising Discount Price 11

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 11, 2013

Under Johnson''s leadership, Penney''s share price plunged by half and the company lost $4 billion in sales. Pundits have ascribed Johnson''s debacle to hubris, incoherent pricing, drive-by leadership, overpromising, reckless haste, inept deal-making (ask Terry Lundgren ), and failing to listen to customers. It''s true.

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Merchandising Retail Gordon Price 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 15, 2017

Pioneers of new business models, such as Alibaba and Amazon, are launching innovations in rapid succession, such as voice ordering and real-time pricing, while simultaneously building scale and driving down costs. In the process, the company became better acquainted with its customers – what they liked to buy and how they liked to shop.

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Retail Chief Executive Officer Supply Chain Operations 10

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 14, 2012

The company is doing pretty well: it has over 800,000 active sellers and a 15 million-person marketplace across 150 countries, and last year its gross merchandise sales reached $525 million. For Etsy's leadership, this was an opportunity to engage their entire team by giving them ownership of how to make Etsy better.

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Merchandising Brainstorming Commitment Proposal 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 1, 2016

When CEO Brian Cornell took the reins two years ago, he inherited a company that had been struggling for years, taking far too few risks, and sticking too close to the core. Successful leadership isn’t just about the leader, it’s about the team. At the same time, Cornell visited stores in person.

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Diversity Retail Discount Brand 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 5, 2016

” That clean-sheet perspective emboldened Intel’s leadership to abandon memory and focus on microprocessors. This painful decision cost tens of thousands of jobs but proved strategically, organizationally, and culturally essential to the company’s future success. But the past is merely a prologue.

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Levitt Disaggregation Kaizen Call Center 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 27, 2017

The bad news: Petabytes of new data and algorithmic innovation assure that “autonomy creep” will relentlessly challenge human oversight from within. At one American retailer, an autonomous ensemble of algorithms replaced the entire merchandising department. Human leadership defers to demonstrable algorithmic power.

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Outsourcing Software CAPEX Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 11, 2015

Mauro Porcini is PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer—the first to hold the position—where he oversees design-led innovation across all the company’s brands under CEO Indra Nooyi. That’s where our work is really about innovation. I strongly believe that design and innovation are exactly the same thing.

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Organization Brand Six Sigma Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2013

Companies are turning to "purpose" and "authenticity" as a way to engage consumers and employees. But it's hard enough to find a purpose in life if you're an individual, let alone an entire company. To understand the power of shared purpose, it's useful to look at the mission statements of leading companies.

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Mission Statement Sports Merchandising Brand 9

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 21, 2013

These are the questions I get from would-be idea entrepreneurs — people who want to go public with a deeply-felt idea so as to influence how people think and behave and, as a result, create some kind of change in their company, discipline, or community. It is a creative endeavor more like personal art-making than commercial innovation.

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Books Merchandising Video Sharpe 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 4, 2015

Innovation is widely regarded as important to long-term business performance. We’ve found that CEOs of big pharmaceutical companies, for example, are more likely to have a background as company lawyers, salespeople, or finance managers, than one in medicine or pharmaceutical R&D.

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CEO Innovation Pharmaceuticals Merchandising 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 26, 2017

Each of these companies has aligned and integrated its culture and brand to create a powerful engine of competitive advantage and growth. Their leaders understand that a strong, differentiated company culture contributes to a strong, differentiated brand — and that an extraordinary brand can support and advance an extraordinary culture.

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Brand Company Operations Merchandising 8

In the CEO Afterlife

NOVEMBER 4, 2012

But even artists have to eat, and the fuel of commerce and industry is innovation and novelty. Economically I probably helped shift some merchandise. Enhanced a few companies’ bottom lines. Let’s trade. Will work for food!” as the street-beggars sign says. At least creatively speaking.

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Advertising Creativity Industry Bottom-up 265

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 8, 2011

How can they build the kind of advantage that will allow their company to thrive for decades? How thoroughly must they transform the company to make this happen? And you certainly can't do it by just watching and copying your competition; sources of greatness are different for different companies, even within the same industry.

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Merchandising Budgeting Pharmaceuticals CEO 14