Where everybody knows your name. The “new shopkeepers.”

More and more the retail world is bifurcating. At one end of the spectrum, you have the high-efficiency players. Great prices, endless assortments, super convenience, built for speed. Amazon, Walmart, iTunes, Home Depot. You get the picture. While each go about it slightly differently, their world is mostly a mass market one. Customer segmentation means [...]

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When the last 15 years happens to you

If you are in retail, the last 15 years or so have brought enormous change. Let me call out a few profound shifts: Winning business model bifurcation: Price and dominant assortments at one end (Wal-mart, Amazon); remarkable experience and assortment curation/product differentiation on the other (Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton). The result is death in the middle. [...]

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Wrong Turn at Lung Fish: Critical Decisions in Strategic Evolution

Twenty years ago the brilliant Chicago-based Steppenwolf Theater Company debuted Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz’ play Wrong Turn at Lung Fish.  This farcical piece is an inquiry into the often harmful peculiarities of human behavior.  In a pivotal scene, one of the characters wonders whether mankind may have made a profound wrong turn along the [...]

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