What business can learn from Adam Scott at Augusta is legendary

All of Australia admired the putt on the 10th (the second replay hole) that won Adam Scott the Masters at Augusta.

Much has been said about Adam Scott’s win – none better than Peter Fitzsimons.

But the win wasn’t set up at the last hole with the last putt. There are several key moments that to preceded that moment in order for him to eventually capitalise on the opportunity.

There are a few obvious milestones along the way:

• It took years of training to get there.
• It took years of performing at the highest levels to be invited to that specific tournament.
• He had to play consistently well (under pressure) for four days before that moment.
• He had to keep the faith even though he wasn’t in the lead.

But this is where it gets interesting. There are many players – arguably even most of the field – that did all of the above.

On the last hole of the last day Scott sunk an excellent putt to take the lead. His opponent had to approach the green and sink the putt (make a birdie) just to draw level. Adam celebrated and pumped his fist when he did it. The emotional high was obvious and it was intense.

He trudged off to complete his scorecard.

His opponent (what a revelation Angel Cabrera was!) played the perfect approach shot and left himself with only a short putt to draw level. Which he duly did. 

What happened next is what distinguished champions from the mere mortals.

Adam had to regather himself and return to the first play-off hole. Like a champion he played every shot well, but his opponent matched him shot for shot. Both had to putt again; on the same hole where Scott thought he might have had it won a few minutes earlier.

Scott was closest to the pin, which meant his opponent had to putt first. Cabrera sank a longish putt which demanded Scott had to sink his stay in the game. It was a relatively simple putt of about three feet (a metre or so). He would expect to sink it 999 time out of a thousand.

But if you know anything about golf you will also know that these putts that you are expected to sink. Just the previous year at the British Open he let a 3-shot lead slip over the last three holes. Those thoughts must have been swirling in his head. 

He rolled the three-footer in confidently.

They then played the second play off hole and we all know what happened. He had to sink a fairly long putt – one that no one would have strange if he had missed it. And he made it.

But I firmly believe that the previous putt on the first play-off hole was the one where the pressure was most. And that is where his champion credentials shone the brightest. And that shot was the difference between a champion and a great champion.

But most importantly: He celebrated his victory with humility.

And that my friend, is the difference between a great champion and a legend.

If your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail

In a previous post I revealed that I have a weakness to explore multiple topics and interests – always seeking the latest and best.

I also have a pet hate, which may or may not be a weakness too. It may be the flipside of my yen for the epistemic; so let me explain:

I am reading a book at the moment This Explains Everything edited by John Brockman. Find it in my Library here.)

Basically it is a hundred plus thinkers/intelligentsia who are all trying to answer the same question: What is your favourite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation. The responses range from theories on consciousness to particle physics to natural selection. (Incidentally, it may the most referenced idea in the book.)

However, one thing struck me immediately:

• Physicists expounded a Physics theory
• Neurobiologists and neuro-scientific idea
• Linguists offered a linguistic idea.

And so on.

The bogan version of that phenomenon would be:

If the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

And THAT is one of my pet hates.

The book offers over a hundred ideas that are meant to be THE idea, which ironically proves the point that there is no ONE IDEA that ever will.

One of the flaws in our everyday thinking patterns is that we think exclusively more often than inclusively:

We normally think the answer is A or B. We rarely think the answer can be A and B.

Example 1: A company may feel compelled to choose between launching Product A or Product B, or feel compelled to choose a market penetration strategy over a diversification strategy.

Example 2: Australians are encouraged (by politicians and media alike) to be either for or against boat people. (The local illegal immigrant narrative in Australia.) But there is an inclusive solution.

Example 3: If you want to persuade a child to brush their teeth before they go to bed, you offer them two options: Do you want to brush your teeth now after the meal or do you want to brush it before you go to bed?

Example 3: In retail sales, we train assistants to use this general thinking style in their favour. When you ask a customer whether they prefer the red dress more or the blue one more, they say neither.

Practical resource constraints aside, there is no logical reason why only one answer will be the right answer.

I am not advocating indecisiveness – that would simply be lazy.

I am not advocating lack of focus – that would simply be stupid.

What I am saying that there isn’t always just one correct answer. There isn’t always just one tool for the job. By recognising this, we may actually save time and money by cutting short the search for perfection.

Dennis Price

• GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.
• Get RetailSmart: CHOOSE HERE.

Do you still beat your wife?

I am stealing this discussion from AC Grayling, renowned modern philosopher to make my point.

Science demands that every statement must be TRUE or FALSE. (E.g. that is how a computer works, that is how philosophy works and that is how all research works – disproving the null hypothesis.

But if you make this statement when there is no king of France, will it be true or false?

The present king of France is bald

You cannot disprove that statement because it has not been reduced to its core underlying assertions. In this case it would be:

• There is such a thing as the king of France
• There is only one such thing
• That thing is bald

This could be become a really long dissertation, but I shall assign that as homework to you J

The fun version of this is to get someone to answer this question?

Do you still beat up your wife?

To answer the question without implicating yourself as a current or former wife molester, you need to break that down to the underlying bare bones of logical assertions. So this is not an academic exercise – you may need it to save your reputation...

Have fun :)

Dennis Price

• GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.
• Get RetailSmart:  Daily, Weekly or Monthly Options – CHOOSE HERE.

NOTE: Grayling referred to Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions to illustrate his original point.

Success is not sexy

I read a blog recently where someone answered that old chestnut: what does it take to be successful. (Jennifer Arrache: How to be an overnight success in 7 years.) More about that soon.

For the moment let’s assume the traditional definition of success is money, fame, power etc in some quantity.

The usual bromides about achieving success are:

• Follow your dream.
• Be passionate.
• Persevere.
• Make every moment count.
• Become an expert.
• Get a qualification.
• Take a chance – be brave.

I could go on.

The one thing that all of this advice has in common is the fact that it makes the giver-of-the-advice look good.

They had a skill or a special ability that most of the population don’t share and they are special and they are different and that is why they are successful.

The real truth is a lot more mundane than that.

1.               It is a given that you must actually be doing something; be engaged in some sort of labour or activity that has the potential to make you successful.

In my own case I have pursued ‘people development’ in the retail supply chain. I love retail. I am life-long learner and a teacher. No real ‘strategy’ behind that decision; just following the age-old wisdom that we should do what we love and success will follow.

Of course we do get strategic in our business. We have been implementing neuroscience principles in the retail selling environment for 4 years – it is not a bandwagon for us. We have a heavy focus on technology and we apply the latest principles of informal and social learning to improve productivity.

It would be stupid to think you can run a ‘training’ business that relies on rolling contract lecturers into classrooms and workshops presenting out of dated manuals.

2.               For success to come your way you need a measure of luck. (I am leaving God out of this for the moment too.) Now, you can’t control your luck – obviously; except that unless you are engaged in something where the luck can be meaningful (see #1 above) then the lucky event may mean nothing of course.

In my own case, when I started out, I applied for and was appointed and an Adjunct Lecturer at MGSM (and later MGSM). I thought that  (a) it would be helpful to associate myself with a serious brand and (b) force myself to stay at the cutting edge and (c) expose me to people from the industry that were on the up and up, leading to potential future work, and also to (d) give something back. Of course being paid to do it was nice, it paid the expenses at least, but I thought I was very clever that I could be paid by someone else to market my business.

None of that happened. But I did win a major international blue chip media company as a client and they wanted to see me in action before engaging me. That would be awkward to arrange if I wanted to have a potential client sit in on a session with an existing client. But no such trouble to attend a lecture on campus.

I never thought about that benefit – and the fact that it happened was sheer luck and had nothing to do with smarts. Of course hanging on to them for the next 5 years took more than luck, but luck gave me the opportunity.

3.               The final, and most important, piece of the success puzzle is contained in the blog I read earlier: PATIENCE.

The latter is obviously related to discipline, focus and perseverance. But the core issue here is patience.

It is not sexy. It does not make for good PR and it especially does not make for good speeches at conferences.

Patience is a virtue – not a skill.

Having patience is somehow not ‘special’ or ‘different’ – anybody could practice patience. When was the last time you heard someone say their greatest strength was ‘patience’?

Patience isn’t mucho – it is more Mother Theresa. It somehow does not fit the cut-and-thrust of entrepreneurship; but I have learned personally that it takes years to get somewhere.

It took over 4 years before any of my social media connections offered up a potential opportunity. It was almost 5 years before it resulted in a speaking engagement.

I have been writing an almost monthly) newsletter for 6 years or more. Whilst it is not designed to be a sales tool – we don’t offer products for sale – it took 6 years before it resulted in the first enquiry that led to actual work. My open rates are significantly higher than industry averages, but it does get disheartening when fewer than 40% even open the email. I came close to quitting the newsletter many times.

It took many years before we did work that was initiated by a client and did not come as a direct result of me picking up the phone or physically meeting someone. Only in the last few years have we been able to ease off on the cold-calling because more work was finding us.

Are we successful?

I suppose it depends on your definition of success. An amazing wife. Super kids. Enough of everything else to allow for discretionary time to read, write and work on amazing projects. It is not Instagram or Facebook. It is not Seth Godin or Tom Peters – but I can live with it because I know that…

… true success does not come from any special talents. You only have to do your thing, and do your thing as well as you possibly can. If you have a little bit of luck, you will have prepared the soil for it to flourish.

You can’t make the flower of success grow any faster with impatience. Just keep doing your thing and everything else will work out the way it does.

Dennis Price

• GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.
• Get RetailSmart:  Daily, Weekly or Monthly Options – CHOOSE HERE.

The key to success – lower your standards

Yeah, I know you believe the opposite. Since you were a babe-in-arms, you were taught to shoot for the stars and you might reach the moon (or was it the ceiling of your room?)

And so many gurus write so many books - whilst just re-phrasing the same old mantra: believe-and-achieve; and the only one achieving anything is the guru lining his pocket at your expense.

Losing weight or making money – it is all the same. The essence of self-improvement philosophy is that there is always room for improvement and that we should simply set goals and takes some action and success invariably follows.

The reality is somewhat otherwise: only about 1% of ANY population can be classed as super-achievers who are independently wealthy. How many people actually achieve the goals they set?

Have you achieved the goals you set? How many of your new year’s resolutions are still intact? Or more importantly how many have been broken? Anyone who is honest will admit that they MAYBE achieve 1% of the goals they set out to achieve.

The reason for this is not that we are stupid. Or that we don’t ‘take action’. (Granted we do stop taking action after a while, but that is only because our sub-conscious made the call, knowing it was hopeless anyway.)

Breathing does not cause you to live, but it is simply a mechanical process of getting oxygen into your system and if you stop doing it you will probably die. Action is similarly a prerequisite for achievement, but not the cause.

The problem is not lack of action, the problem is unrealistic goals.

How many kids are being pushed on the sports fields by parents who are blind to the lack of natural talent in their own offspring? Everybody else can see it – except the ones in the middle of it.

Maybe you don’t have what it takes to be another Lleyton? Maybe you don’t have it in you to be the next CEO? Maybe you don’t have what it takes to run your own business?

Don’t believe the advertisements. Sometimes you can’t just do it. Sometimes the impossible is just impossible. Life is not just. Life is not perfect. Things go wrong. Everything is not gonna be OK – every time.

What does have to do with a site devoted to starting and running a dynamic business?

1. Don’t promise things that you can’t deliver.
2. Don’t tell the customer she looks fabulous in that red dress.
3. If you can’t get to the customer straight away, don’t say ‘I will be just a sec’ – you won’t be.
4. Your product isn’t perfect and you buying your service won’t dramatically improve their quality.

Stop bulsh*tting your self and your customers. Take a reality check. Be honest with yourself. Be honest with your stakeholders and customers – it is called authenticity.  

And once you have set the real baseline, work hard (and dare I say it – take action) and grind out small incremental improvements from there.

And miraculously those BHAGs become smaller and closer.

And if you think I am joking, research has proven that your goals should be about ‘getting better’ not about the extreme/ wishful thinking types of goals. Lowering your standards and going for smaller, achievable goals is motivating.

Retail is just like cricket

I am sure NO ONE in Australia could have avoided seeing some cricket. Which got me thinking about the similarities with business (and retail). Often these 'sporting analogies are a bit twee... but this holds true I think.

1. If you don’t keep score it doesn’t matter
2. There is room for fast and slow players
3. It is all about shot selection (under pressure and at speed)
4. You need a bit of luck to survive
5. You have to rock and play even if there is no crowd
6. The game is not won in the nets, but it is lost there.
7. The best plans will be made redundant by your competitor
8. Everyone has a different role, but everyone has to bat
9. Sooner or later you will drop the ball. What matters is that you fix it quickly and not do it again.
10. You may get away with a play-and-miss occasionally, but not always.

I am sure you can add more...

Dennis

PS: Free eBook – 101 uncomfortable truths about marketing you don’t want to know on our website

101 uncomfortable truths about marketing you don't want to know

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101 uncomfortable truths about marketing you don't want to know

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You should sweat the small stuff

Be boring

At the beginning of every year we are inundated with posts reviewing the past, predicting the future or making plans for the year ahead.

Whilst all of those things are useful to a certain extent, most of the time they are actually not prerequisites for success in any business venture. None of the key drivers of the current economic environment were widely accepted in the mainstream – until it happened.

(The trend that matters most can be found here only because it is a meta-trend that has been happening in repetitive cycles for over 3000 years.)

What is crucial is to be in the moment. It is what you DO today that matters most.

People confuse planning to do with doing. People confuse reminiscing about the past with analysis.

Success is more boring than all of those things. Success is about doing stuff today. (There are very good arguments to suggest even doing random stuff is more likely to lead to a successful outcome than trying to pick a winner, but I won’t push our acquaintance that far so early in the year.)

You should make time to work on your business plan, research the market and analyse the competition. You should be evaluating shopping cart technologies for your new website. You should allocate time to think. Of course. But not at the expense of doing and not at the expense of doing the boring stuff.

1.      Do the post-Christmas stocktake – and enter the data in your system

2.      Clean the store

3.      Check the lighting

4.      Do a safety check

5.      Clean out your database

6.      Check your website, your store, your signage etc for all 2012 leftovers

7.      Refresh the merchandising

8.      … and build a ‘system’ that will make all these things happen all the time!

Engaging intelligently with the ‘system’ that is your business is more likely to produce an innovative insight than crunching ‘big data’. Attention to little details such as these is what separates the mediocre from the excellent and the lucky from the smart.

Then, and only then do you have the foundation from which to change, transform, adapt or grow a new, better profitable business.

Sweat the small stuff because it is all small stuff.

We have a ‘strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.”  — Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines)

Dennis Price

GANADOR: Conceiving and implementing SMART solutions to create high-performance retail environments.

Things are rarely obvious

Read a great post by Freek Vermeulen (HBR) on how best practice is ruining your business. This follows on from my post on the disease of skeuomorphism in your business model.

In essence it is the same thing: people do things because it is the way it has always been done that way. It is natural human thinking patterns because we rarely devote resources to riddles already solved once. We 'survived' and that is all that matters. to the species.

But it is sub-optimal and needs addressing if we are serious about living through the Retail Revolution.

Read all about it: The Pendulum

There is a very insightful book on the market titled Pendulum (Williams & Drew, 2012). I don’t suspect it is going to be piled up at the entrance to Dymocks any time soon – but it is an important work – and does a very good job of indentifying the meta-cycles in western society.

They argue that there are distinct social patterns that exist on a fixed cycle of 80 years, which are divided into 4 equal 20 year quarters. The two peaks of cycle are the polar opposites where we get a ME- Society and a WE-Society.

Western society is currently experiencing the upswing towards the peak of the WE Society. Australia seems to follow the US cycle of the pendulum but the Asian cycle appears out of sync with the Western cycle. China shows evidence of entering a ME cycle with and what happens to Australia will be really interesting to see. Will we synchronise with Asia? Will we stay in tune with the West?

The pendulum metaphor is apt as there are two distinct peaks in the rhythm of society – and they are polar opposites.

The next 10 years (2013 – 2023) will take us towards the peak of the WE generation. It is no surprise that ‘social media’ is the driving force that it is because that technology has found fertile soil in the collective societal mindset.

If you want to understand what is going to drive social norms and popular culture over the next 10 years, then find the defining moments and attributes of 1933-1943. If we turn back the clock 80 years we will find the defining technology in the US was radio. Vacuum tubes in the early 20’s led to a proliferation of radio sets being sold and radio stations mushroomed in the late 20s and early thirties – paving the way for the mass communications – much like early chat rooms gave way to social media in the current upswing to a new collective ‘WE’.

If you consider the mid 30s to mid 40s the equivalent period in history, then there are quite a few major events and decisions that seem to support the thesis.

The equivalent phase of the cycle in Australian history illustrates the prevailing WE culture clearly.

1. At the 1937 elections, both political parties advocated increased defence spending – the arguments being that it was for the common good.
2. Minister for War Organisation of Industry, John Dedman introduced a degree of austerity and government control previously unknown, to such an extent that he was nicknamed "the man who killed Father Christmas." In May 1942 uniform tax laws were introduced in Australia, as state governments relinquished their control over income taxation.
3. Immigration was initially introduced to protect the collective: In 1945, Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell wrote “If the experience of the Pacific War has taught us one thing, it surely is that seven million Australians cannot hold three million square miles of this earth’s surface indefinitely. (The current debate about boat people being denied access is exactly to be expected as we move towards an era where our identity will largely be defined by our membership of a particular group.)

All of these are prime examples of how individual freedom and needs are suppressed and even sacrificed for the ‘common good’ which defines the WE era.

The Vietnam War coincided with the downswing into the ‘ME’. Authority was questioned. Previously unquestioned alliances with the US were questioned. Despite Holt’s sentiments and his government’s electoral success in 1966, the war became unpopular in Australia, as it did in the United States. The movements to end Australia’s involvement gathered strength after the Tet Offensive of early 1968 and compulsory national service became increasingly unpopular too.

Suddenly the ‘WE’ wasn’t such a compelling cause any more.

Of course the defining behaviours of the 60s were the hippy revolution and free love. In the lead up to the ME (1960s) about 60% of Australian manufacturing was protected by tariffs.

Approaching the peak of the ME cycle, in 1983 Hawke and Keating abandoned traditional Labor support for tariffs to protect industry and jobs. They moved to deregulate Australia’s financial system and ‘floated’ the Australian dollar. In 1987 the defining movie of this generation was Wall Street in which Michael Douglas famously quipped: Greed is Good.

Movies like Rambo Rocky and the Chuck Norris genre was all about Lone Rangers conquering the world against all the odds. The #1 song for 1983 was Every Breath You Take

If you believe that pop culture reflects society – then consider the extreme individualism and excesses of Kiss and The Village People.

Today, as we head into the WE – Rambo has made room for the Expendables where all yesterdays. Heroes have seen the light and joined forces.

Everybody is now in a community having conversations…

Unfortunately, we are going to take this too far:

• Read this and weep I (Global Noise)
• Read this and weep II (Victoria’s Secret)

It is a fascinating read and the insights are quite profound. If you have a strategic responsibility of any kind in your business, you should get the book. (Amazon link – not available at Dymocks.)

Newsletter subscribers received this article first - for an extended version of this article, including tables and graphs, you can subscribe to get (free) access to all current and past content.

HAVE FUN (but don’t take it too far.)

Love

What’s love got to do with it?

Does love have anything to do with Retail?

Everything.

I have written (a lot) about the keys t success and the reasons for failure. I have been careful not to define any of those a ‘silver bullet’. Customer experience. Staff. Training. Merchandising. Mobile. Social. The list goes on…

But, if there is one thing that gets pretty close to being the ‘unified theory of everything’ as far as retail goes; this is it: LOVE.

1. Love your job

I see so many people who are not proud to be a retailer and don’t admit to being a retailer. For example; I meet newsagents who cling to the misguided idea that somehow a newsagent is some exalted form of retail, but they don’t want to be a retailer. Often their particular store is just an old-fashioned convenience store, and they nothing but a shopkeeper – as if there is shame in that.

Shopkeeping is a profession if you are professional about it.

2. Love your customer

I have said this often in presentations, classes, and lectures: Retailing is not about product, price and promotion – the usually list of Ps – but retailing is really only about one thing; people.

Every retailer is in the people business. (Except maybe banks.) If you don’t like people, even the ones that give you the heebie jeebies, you are in the wrong business. If you heart doesn’t go a-flutter when a customer walks into your store, you should find something else to do.

3. Love your product

Some people are born for the buzz and pace of hospitality, others are shoe people. Other still are born to be in books or love to get lost in the knick-knacky world of gifts. And if you ask a book lover to run a restaurant, they never seem to do as well as they otherwise would.

It is a fact that people love certain things more than other things. And it is obvious why this fact plays a role in how good they are when they find their passion.

4. And above all, love yourself

What can I say? Listen to your self-talk. What do you say to yourself when you catch yourself making a mistake? If the answer is not very flattering, then you have some work to do, because accepting and loving yourself is the starting point. (And this is not about drinking from the lake of Narcissus.)

The idea of love may at first not seem appropriate for the cut-and-thrust of commerce. I hear often that retail is a numbers game. But it isn’t a numbers game; that is just how we keep score for lack of something better.

Retail is about love. Really.

Go hug a customer. (You know what I mean.)

Dennis.

At Ganador we help the retail supply chain love what they do by getting better at it.

PS1: If you want to watch a video on the real unified theory of everything, here is 42 minutes on string theory. And it is not as boring as it sounds.

PS2: I have written a rant on my private Tumblr about the lie that love makes the world go round as promised in all our pop songs – just for a different perspective.

Facebook Update of the Week

Over at GMS Facebook - we share some serious and some not so serious stuff.

My favourite one of the week (so far) is this one. Guess which category it falls in to...:)

Being hit so hard that...