nickshanagher

My children hate Malcolm Gladwell and they don’t even know him. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposed that you had to spend 10,000 hours practising something to become an expert. I won’t let them read The Click Moment , a book from Frans Johansson that proposes that luck has just as big a role to play in success – unless you want to be a chess grandmaster, a tennis star or a classical musician. But The Click Moment will make me more sympathetic when they complain about the long work. Maybe they will get lucky early, I think. But I doubt it. Take the story of Ray Preston who found the perfect spot for his independent bookstore in New York. A month after he opened, a major civic project started that diverted foot traffic away from his shop. Ray tried lots of different things to save his shop. He sold his apartment and moved into the stock room to invest in it. But he reached the point when he thought he would go bust in three weeks’ time. I might as well have some fun, h...

The ever thought-provoking John Kay recently used some retail examples in his FT column to explain how pay links with output. He wrote: "I suspect that one reason French supermarket queues are longer than British ones is that the statutory minimum wage applicable to jobs such as checkout assistants is about 30 per cent higher in France..." Does any local retailer have a view on this? Or could you set out to check if the model works? He continued: "British supermarkets, noticing that office workers shop during their lunch break, staff the checkout more heavily then: French ones close tills to allow employees to eat at leisure." Again, is this true? At Heathrow recently I bought a bottle of water at WHSmith - it is much cheaper than from the food outlets when it comes free with the Daily Telegraph. My penalty was to stand in a queue of 15 people as only one of the two tills was manned. The point is that there are lots of things going on that affect queuing...

The hypermarket and superstore share of all retail sales declined from 23.8% in 2000 to 18.6% in 2011, according to Planet Retail/Comscore figures quoted by the Financial Times. In future, general merchandise will not be in a big box - it will be delivered in a cardboard box, the FT quotes Dalton Philips of Morrisons.

Malcolm Hepworth of eXPD8 (say it out aloud), a UK field marketing company, pinpointed retailer compliance as one of the weaknesses of the symbol groups that was a barrier to greater supplier support. While some of the groups - such as Spar and Nisa - are doing well, others are falling down because they accept compliance levels of just over 50 per cent and they "accepted that retailers liked to shop around the various cash & carries for the best deals!" The retailers need to learn, he suggests, that discipline is the best way forward. However, he ignores the fact that the members of these symbol groups are independent retailers with different trading philosophies. On paper, his business model is correct. In practice, there must be a tension between the wholesale and retail partners as buying decisions make a huge difference to profitability and what works on a national or regional scale may not work in a local context. His other point about how long it was taking ...

City analysts are in the business of talking shares up and talking them back down again. So you have to treat what they say with caution. Even so, their feedback about Tesco, offers some pointers about where the convenience market may be headed. At Citigroup they talked about a future Tesco that within a few years would be an "entity without growth or cash flow generation." That is, it would not longer be opening new space and it would be forced into cutting prices. The issues are: concerns that new space opened will reduce profit margins (which may include on line sales as delivery costs are subsidised by bricks and mortar shoppers) competition from Aldi, which is about 25 per cent cheaper and growing strongly. In the UK, Tesco has 39.1 million square feet of selling space. In the last half year it achieved sales of £23.9bn in the UK. That is just over £23 of sales a week per square foot. This compares with estimates for Spar of £13, Premier of £12 and Londis of £11...

Between starting to read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in the Spring of 2011 and finishing the book today, its author Steven Covey died. I am not sure about where the book is placed in the pantheon of great business books (I can see from the cover that 15 million copies have been sold) but what made me buy the book was the number of times it was referenced by people I respect. His seven principles (to which an eighth has been appended for the digital age) underpin a lot of other good self-development and management books. His ideas are frequently used by others. "Begin with the end in mind" is not quite what I had been told it was. There are two reasons why it took me so long to read the book. The first reason is Steven himself urges his reader to take it slowly. The second is that his prose style is frequently dry. But I am glad I set out on the journey. As T S Eliot wrote: "We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be ...