You don't have to be lucky to be a success

There are five things that most people get wrong about what makes great companies succeed. Great companies are not led by risk takers. They do not innovate more than their competitors. They are not quicker to react to change. They don’t change the way they work. And they don’t have more good luck.

In Great byChoice, written by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen, the real attributes of success are analysed and presented in a way that will help any business leader think about what she is doing well and where she needs to improve.

But first a spoiler alert. If you are a fan of Robert Falcon Scott, this book is not for you. Collins and Hansen use a discussion of the ways that Roald Amundsen and Scott approached their 1911 race to be first to the South Pole to demonstrate how the findings above make the difference between life and death.

While the book runs to 304 pages, mostly to back up the authors’ arguments, you can get a great deal out of reading the stories. In just six pages they explain why “Amundsen and his team reached home base in good shape on January 25, the precise day he’d penned into his plan. Running out of supplies, Scott stalled in mid-March, exhausted and depressed. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found the frozen bodies of Scott and his two companions in a forlorn, snow-drifted little tent, just ten miles short of his supply depot.”

Who are you like Amundsen or Scott? they ask. And using 14 comparison companies in pairs (Microsoft versus Apple being one surprise) they challenge you to think about how you have organised your business for success - or not.

Ponder on this. Southwest is the most successful airline in the world. Its comparison company was Pacific Southwest Airlines based in California. Its president Lamar Muse openly admitted that it copied PSA’s ideas.

“We don’t mind being copycats of an operation like that, said Muse in 1971 referring to visits he and other Southwest executives made to PSA as they assembled their operating plans. The visiting entrepreneurs took notes on every detail and they returned to Texas with copious notes and a set of operating manuals that they used to mimic PSA’s model to the smallest detail. Lamar Muse wrote that creating the operating manuals for his upstart airline was primarily a cut-and-paste procedure.”

PSA was happy to share because before deregulation Southwest could only operate in Texas and not in California. However, PSA failed because when deregulation came and when oil shocks and pilot strikes and other turmoil came, it abandoned its plan. Southwest stuck to it and it has been profitable every year.

The big lesson for the local shopkeeper is to copy the best (as Jim Walton did for Walmart) and stick to your plans.

“In the end, we can control only a tiny sliver of what happens to us. But even so, we are free to choose, free to become great by choice.” If you are looking to benchmark your strategy and this appeals to you, then you will find a lot of value in this book.

For more, see www.betterretailing.com.

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...

New look: big copy small?

The owners of B&Q are talking up how they have cut the price of a store refit from £2.5m to £1m by using wood-effect vinyl instead of wood and painted MDF backboards for displays. Managers are learning to live with grey shelving instead of a warmer-looking cream. Shoppers notice the produce, not the fixtures, suggests one executive. Up to a point! Most local retailers will extract the maximum possible life from their fixtures, sometimes taking too long to change equipment that has become tired. As in all business, it is getting the balance right. Shops need to be refreshed and with a purpose.

The secrets of persuasion: No short cuts.

The best moment in my interview with Terri Sjodin, who teaches many of the world’s top corporations how to sell persuasively, is when she smiles at me and asks to hear my “elevator speech". My mind literally goes blank. The author of Small Message, Big Impact , her new book on how to craft powerful messages that persuade people to listen to you, has thrown the gauntlet at me. There was nowhere to hide. I had just told her how I had used her book to write out my three minute speech to open the Local Shop Summit. She listened patiently to my pitch, thought for a moment, and said: “I bet you had an illustration in your mind of an independent who really capitalised on your ideas and has taken them to the bank.” I could swear she was reading my mind. I blushed and nodded. “So you should open with this story,” she said. “Start out by saying: ‘Let me open the conference by telling you a great story with a happy ending.’ So the audience will say to themselves: ‘He is goi...

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