Covid has made working life more complex for intra- and entrepreneurs.
Covid has made us individually more productive yet collectively we struggle. There is much talk about the increased productivity of the individual, but does that lead to increased productivity of the whole? I suspect not.
Collaboration is wicked harder. When you can’t rally internal corporate teams around a vision as effectively as before, when you miss all the serendipitous moments in an office environment, “accidental progress” simply never surfaces.
If everything is by scheduled Zoom meeting, when is the serendipitous “aha”? Where does that appear? In an entrepreneur’s life, the answer is, it really doesn’t as much. For those of us that have lived on Zoom for two years, it’s easy to forget what a live experience feels like.
Living only on Zoom is a very different life and experience. The blended “new normal” that we will reach over time must balance collective progress, collective insight, and collective collaboration with individual productivity.
The question all retail leaders should ask themselves to ensure future business success.
Consumers know that they are now in the driving seat. The growth in the US online shopping category in the last 2 years – 13% by some counts, is creating a monumental shift in expectations. This is bringing with it a “death of presumptions” about what we thought customers want – even if it was right, it’s probably not true anymore, or certainly not the same as it was two years ago.
So, the question for retail leaders becomes how fast are you adapting? The simple answer is not to prognosticate in the Zoom Room, but to ask our customers what they want out of the online experience and the physical experience. Ask that question, and they’ll be explicit.
The one piece of business advice that has helped me in the last year.
Tenacity and grit beat strategy and brilliance all day long.
The business model that is in desperate need of reinvention is…
Social media: it’s a horrible game. We’re shooting for eyeballs or clicks or put your favorite metric on that, and yet you know the bulk of metrics things are misleading at best. Freemium for consumers has never been truly premium – Facebook, Google, they didn’t have to go the way they did. Early on, they made the choice to make services free to the consumer because it spreads more rapidly than a subscription model, and if they do that, you’re paying them and then you’re their customer rather than the advertisers. They made that choice. Everybody followed the same path. Now we’re at a place where we need important social, political, economic reinvention to address the damage these models have caused.
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