Retail Team Quotes

This example from the retail world should be instructive: if you have only enough employees to barely get the work done as is, you’ve engineered a scenario in which employees may have theoretical permission to take time off, but understand that they’ll shoulder the burden of that time off in some way. Either they try to keep doing part of their work while on leave, a colleague takes on an even larger work burden, or a portion of essential work goes undone, slowing everyone on a team.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

-Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter. The following passage is an example of typical dialogue writing: A: Tomorrow is a big day. You have an interview at a college. How do you feel? B: I am really nervous. This is the first interview and I don’t know what it is going to be like. A: What are you afraid of? B: I’m afraid I’ll stutter and say something stupid. I’m worried the person will ask a question and I won’t know what to say. A: What do you want to discuss? B: I think it is good that I was on the basketball team for four years. That shows commitment and dedication. I also got decent grades and earned a blue ribbon at the science fair. A: What about your hobbies outside of school? B: I really like to read. I could mention that. I could talk also about the vacations my family has taken. They are pretty interesting. I enjoy my part-time retail job. A: It sounds like you do a lot. B: I guess I am good at organizing my life and accomplishing what needs to be done. Hey, that would sound good in an interview! -Try focused “freewriting.” Pick one topic, such as school, friends, or family, and write everything that comes to mind about that topic. Write for at least ten minutes or until you’re certain that you have run out of things to write. -Write your belief system. Start by writing “I believe…” at the top of a clean page. Then write whatever comes to mind. It may help to ask yourself questions when you get stuck such as “What do I believe about friendship?” “What is my personal style?” or “What are my gifts and abilities?” -Write about an event from your perspective, then write about the same event from someone else’s point of view. For example, if you had a hard time answering a question during class, write about how you felt, what you thought, and how you behaved. Next, pretend you are the teacher writing about the same event. What do you think he or she was thinking? How did he or she act? This exercise is a great way to show that there are multiple ways of seeing the same situation.

The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

In the early 1990s, Target adopted some of Walt Disney’s staff training and customer service initiatives. It has since developed a variety of methods—from hiring to coaching to grading performance—to ensure “team members” embody the motto “fast, fun and friendly.” (See Chapter 5.)

What analyses could prove or disprove that belief? You could break out the sales by customer type for each region. If penetration of superstores in the Northeast is higher than in any other region and higher than for the other types of retail outlets, find out why. When you talk to the Northeast sales reps, you might find that they have a better feel for superstores than any other sales team. What if they were put in charge of all superstores across the country and achieved the same penetration? What would that mean for widget sales? The end product of this exercise is what McKinsey calls the issue tree. In other words, you start with your initial hypothesis and branch out at each issue. The result looks like the figure below. When you’ve completed your issue tree, you have your problem-solving map. That’s the easy part. The difficult part will come when you have to dig deep to prove your hypothesis.

In the Acme Widgets problem, suppose your team decided that the key drivers were the sales force, the consumer marketing strategy, and production costs. You then came up with a list of actionable, top-line recommendations as your initial hypothesis: We can increase widget sales by: • Changing the way we sell our widgets to retail outlets. • Improving the way we market our widgets to consumers. • Reducing the unit cost of our widgets. Let’s begin with a closer look at the sales force. It’s organized geographically (Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, etc.) and sells primarily to three types of retail outlets: superstores, department stores, and specialty stores. The team believes that the sales force ought to be organized by customer type—that’s one issue.

The problem you face is “We need to sell more widgets.” Your team might come up with a list of the following ways to increase widget sales: • Changing the way we sell our widgets to retail outlets. • Improving the way we market our widgets to consumers. • Reducing the unit cost of our widgets. If this list looks rather generic, that’s fine; we will talk about moving down a level of detail in the next section. What matters is that the list is MECE. Suppose you add another item, say, “Reengineering our widget production process.” How does that fit with the three issues you already have? This is certainly an important issue, but it isn’t a fourth point alongside the others. It falls under “Reducing the unit cost,” along with other subissues such as “Leveraging our distribution system” and “Improving our inventory management.” Why? Because all these are ways to reduce the unit cost of widgets. Putting any (or all) of them with the other three issues on the list would cause an overlap. The items in the list would no longer be mutually exclusive. Overlap represents muddled thinking by the writer and leads to confusion for the reader.

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

Platinum Flooring Company’s certified and skilled installers are trained to install hardwood products for any give art form, which would not only make your new floor look great, but last long for years to come. The Platinum Flooring Company’s specialist would not only help you select the perfect laminate flooring for your home that would suit your home décor as well as budget, but would also install your new laminate flooring for a fast, worry-free installation experience. Platinum Flooring Company is a full service, Hayward based flooring and installation firm specializing in classic design with a global influence. Whether designing residential or commercial spaces, Platinum Flooring has built a reputation on achieving highly individual results for a discerning clientele across the state of California and Beyond. At Platinum Floor Company, we have a separate team of stair installers headed by a stair specialist, having intense knowledge of different wood species, latest technology tools and in-depth knowledge of angular complexities. “Wooden floor, especially hardwood is good as it can take a lot of abuse and has a greater life expectancy compared to laminate or engineered floors.”, says Alex Vongsouthi – Founder, Platinum Flooring Company. But there are several reasons which can make your wood floor crack or separate between boards, cup, crown, etc. some being high traffic on the floor, spillages, sunlight and high percentage of moisture content in the room. With this it can be difficult to know whether floors need to be replaced or can be fixed. Platinum Flooring is renowned for its high standards and uncompromising service quality, with the expertise of a high-end retailer in Hardwood, Engineered wood and Laminate flooring.

The same year we also acquired Financial Network Services (FNS), an Australian company with a retail banking software package called Bancs24. We needed them because some of our competitors had begun to target that market segment with their own IP. Bancs24 was a very comprehensive package and we were able to successfully win the systems integration contract for the State Bank of India (SBI) Group for implementation of core banking. Since we had invested considerable effort in customizing and strengthening it we felt acquiring FNS would be strategic for our products business. During our initial dealings with FNS and its feisty owner Tony Ward we learned to our surprise that when the product was being developed in the early 1980s TCS had deputed its programmers to Sydney to work with Tony and his team to help develop the product. Since the acquisition we have been able to deploy the FNS software package, rechristened ‘Bancs’, extensively with a number of domestic clients. Today close to 50 per cent of the banking transactions in India are processed by Bancs, thereby justifying the acquisition we made.

In a subsequent study, this time in New York City, Pager and her colleagues fielded teams of White, Black, and Latinx testers to apply for real entry-level jobs. The testers were articulate, clean-cut, college-educated young men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, similar in height, physical attractiveness, verbal skill, and interactional style and demeanor. The Latinx testers were US citizens of Puerto Rican descent and spoke without a Spanish accent. The testers were trained to present themselves in similar ways to potential employers as high school graduates with steady work experience in entry-level jobs. They applied for jobs in restaurants and retail sales, as warehouse workers, couriers, telemarketers, stockers, movers, customer service representatives, and other similar jobs available to someone with a high school degree and little previous experience. In applications to 171 employers, the White testers received a positive response (interview or job offer) 31 percent of the time, the Latinx testers received a positive response 25.2 percent of the time, and the Black testers, 15.2 percent of the time. Stated differently, the Black applicant had to search twice as long as the equally qualified White applicant before receiving a callback or a job offer.22

Jon Slade, chief commercial officer of Financial Times, told Digiday, “We dialed up our marketing on a real-time basis. We were looking at buying patterns, opportunities in social, and spending our marketing budgets in pretty aggressive ways in an attempt to try and dominate a story. We then made sure that didn’t conflict with the efforts of our audience engagement team, so there was constant dialogue between audience engagement and editorial, and between marketing and acquisition.” There is at least as much innovation and creativity happening in FT’s acquisition efforts as there is in its exceptional journalism. FT also has a simple but brilliant formula for gauging reader engagement. Borrowing from the retail sector, they score every one of their readers on the multiple of three factors: recency (when did they last visit?), frequency (how often do they visit?), and volume (how many articles have they read?). Low scores indicate churn risks that their promotions group can approach with discount offers.

If anyone wants to learn how to become a better UX designer and overall human, they should work in retail or the service industry. Front-of-house and back-of-house translate to front-end and back-end design. Not only do you learn how to manage customer expectations, but you learn how to encourage the team around you for overall, a better customer experience.

So how do you think scripts should be read? How can they be read? When I was trying to write the stage directions for publication—in those final few weeks of scramble before we opened—I got really worried about all this. I remember in rehearsals we’d delete chunks of the script because the actors were communicating something effortlessly with a look, so didn’t need the lines I’d written. This script was created for a particular group of actors, but others need to inhabit the roles too. The reader needs to visualize the characters, as does the director. When you’re reading a script for the first time, what are you looking for? JOHN: As a director, the first time you read a new script is very precious. It’s the closest you’re ever going to be to an audience watching a production of this script for the first time. Reading a finished script should allow us access to the story, its characters, and the themes the playwright is exploring. A script can make us laugh and cry. It can take us through the joy of its story and also make us feel deep despair for the suffering of its characters. A script builds towards a fully realized production and an experience that can be shared with the audience.   As a playwright, how much of this full experience do you imagine when you are writing a script? Do you speak the characters’ lines out loud as you type them? JACK: I do worse than that, I move like them. Which, when you’re working in well-known coffee shops and sandwich retailers, can lead to you attracting some strange looks. I find myself twisting into the character and gesticulating like them. It’s all very embarrassing.   The thing that was perhaps most interesting about the process of writing this particular script is that I have never spent more time with actors—ever. Through the weeks of workshops and then weeks of rehearsals we were all in those rooms together for so long, all of us, from the design team to the sound team to the lights. I don’t think any of us have experienced anything like that—I think it probably works out at eight months or so, all in all. What effect would you say that had on what was created? I’m sure it made it all a lot better, but more than that do you think it somehow changed the tone of what we did?

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

Retail selling benefits from aggressive publicity.

In many organizations, your ability to grow in your career will hit a ceiling unless you start managing people. All C-level executives lead teams. If your ambitions are to be a CEO or VP someday, you’re going to need to move on to the management track. There are also jobs where, beyond a certain skill level, the only path for growth is learning how to manage and coordinate the work of more and more people—for example, in customer support or retail sales

Identify some of the actual individuals who are your best customers. Evaluate those with the highest customer lifetime value (CLV) and develop hypotheses about their shared traits. Although demographics and psychographics might be the most obvious, you’ll find additional insights if you examine their behavior. What channels did they come through? What messages resonated? How did they onboard? How recently, frequently, and deeply have they engaged? Compare best customers and worst customers—those you acquired who weren’t ultimately profitable or who weren’t satisfied with your offering. Notice people who exhaust your free trial but don’t convert to paid, or who join but cancel within the first few months. The best customers have the greatest customer lifetime value (CLV); they will spend more with you over time than anyone else. Produce either a qualitative write-up of your best customer or use regression analysis to prioritize characteristics. Share these conclusions with your frontline team—retail workers, customer support, sales—to accrue early insights. With a concrete conception of your best customer, you can discern if the customer segment is sufficiently large to justify addressing. Test and adjust as needed. Then make these best customers and their forever promise as “real” as possible to the team. If you have actual customers who fit the profile, talk about them, invite them in, or have their pictures on your wall. You’re going to feel their pain, share their objectives, and design experiences for them. It’s important to know them well.

Nordstrom, the high-end retailer, was one of the earliest to launch an innovation lab back in 2013. Two years later, the brand announced that it was shrinking its lab and reassigning its employees into other groups. When asked about it by online site Geekwire, a Nordstrom spokesperson said, “rather than just a team focused on innovation, it’s now everyone’s job.” The natural evolution of any external skillset that starts with being “insourced” is to eventually become integrated into the overall way business is done.

In lieu of providing unionized jobs with decent conditions, the new retail stores learned from Walmart to pay lip service to workers’ wants and needs, to embrace “teamwork” while making sure workers didn’t actually team up enough to organize.

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As I was to learn, the process for creating the digital media business would be quite different because there was so much more to creating a great digital media customer experience than simply adding the next retail category to the Amazon website. The first part of the process went as normal. Our team of three or four people developed plans using the tried-and-true MBA-style methods of the time. We gathered data about the size of the market opportunity. We constructed financial models projecting our annual sales in each category, assuming, of course, an ever-increasing share of digital sales. We calculated gross margin assuming a certain cost of goods from our suppliers. We projected an operating margin based on the size of the team we would need to support the business. We outlined the deals we would make with media companies. We sketched out pricing parameters. We described how the service would work for customers. We put it all together in crisp-looking PowerPoint slides (this was still several months before the switch to narratives) and comprehensive Excel spreadsheets.

When the retail, operations, and finance teams began to construct the initial Amazon WBR, they turned to a well-known Six Sigma process improvement method called DMAIC, an acronym for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control.1 Should you decide to implement a Weekly Business Review for your business, we recommend following the DMAIC steps as well. The order of the steps matters. Progressing through this metrics life cycle in this order can prevent a lot of frustration and rework, allowing you to achieve your goals faster.

The company even drew unlikely customers. From rural Arkansas, operating just five comically cheap-looking stores—a rounding error compared with the largest retailers—Sam Walton made his way to an IBM conference for retailers. While he shied away from investing anything in any emotional aspect of retailing, delivering the lowest prices meant mastering logistics and information. To one speaker at the conference, Abe Marks, modern retailing meant knowing exactly “how much merchandise is in the store? What’s selling and what’s not? What is to be ordered, marked down or replaced? . . . The more you turn your inventory, the less capital is required.” Altering his first impression, Marks found that Walton’s simpleton comportment masked his genius as a retailer, eventually calling him the “best utilizer of information that there’s ever been.” A little over two decades later, Sam Walton would become the richest man in America; he would attribute his competitive advantage to his investment in computing systems in his early days. The small-town merchant who expected that knowing his customers’ names or sponsoring the local Little League team would give him some enduring advantage simply didn’t understand the sport. American consumers, technocrats at heart, rewarded efficiency as reflected by the prices on the shelves, not the quaint sentiments of a friendly proprietor. To gain this efficiency, information systems were seen as vital.

In 2000 Amazon had a giant monolithic mess of engineers and code powering the fast-growing retail business. Engineers were stepping all over each other, and the coordination energy to get anything done was massive. Things were slowing down, so Bezos wrote the “two-pizza team” memo proposing that they divide the company into small teams in order to move faster. (The idea was that you could feed the whole team with two pizzas.)

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The mobile industry quickly developed, and lawyers, investment bankers, consultants and contractors offered their services. The feeling of ownership of the projects and the effort of getting networks up and running within the shortest possible time span was gigantic. Engineers slept in their cars to make sure that they could start early mornings, ‘war rooms’ were kitted out with huge maps, project timelines, pictures and milestone markers. Contests ongoing between different teams in the specific country regions where we were building. Employing a thousand people in no time and generating work for tenfold that number; network and other suppliers, construction companies, distributors, retailers and other often highly skilled third parties.

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

Located on 9th Avenue in New York City, B& H Photo is the largest non-chain photo and video equipment store in the United States and the second largest in the world —only Yodobashi Camera in downtown Tokyo is bigger. The owners, along with many of their employees, are Hasidic Jews who dress just as their eighteenth-century ancestors did in Eastern Europe. On any given day, 8,000 to 9,000 people pass through the front door. Yet 70 percent of their business is online, serviced by a 200,000-square-foot warehouse located nearby in Brooklyn. Even in a competitive marketplace, B& H won’t conduct business on the Sabbath or on about a half-dozen Jewish holidays during the year. They close their doors at 1 p.m. on Fridays and keep them closed all day Saturday, the biggest shopping day of the week. During Sabbath, customers can peruse the B& H website, but they can’t make an online order. Recently a customer asked the B& H director of communications how they could close not just the retail store but also the website on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year. The director simply replied, “We respond to a higher authority.” 17

Based in Manchester and serving the UK, we specialise in the fabrication and installation of Aluminium Windows, Doors, Bi Folding Doors, Hybrid Windows and Shopfronts. We have worked on many large projects across the UK and are equally at home working with small to medium businesses, pubs and other retail outlets and in domestic environments. Our team have over 25 years experience and our fabricators are among some of the best in the UK.

One enterprising U.S. brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers, announced that, unlike its competitors, it did not sell retail stock market orders to high-frequency traders, and even installed a button that enabled investors to route their orders directly to IEX, the stock market created by Brad Katsuyama and his team, who would protect them.

Koch Agriculture first branched out into the beef business, and it did so in a way that gave it control from the ranch to the butcher’s counter. Koch bought cattle feedlots. Then it developed its own retail brand of beef called Spring Creek Ranch. Dean Watson oversaw a team that worked to develop a system of “identity preservation” that would allow the company to track each cow during its lifespan, allowing it over time to select which cattle had the best-tasting meat. Koch held blind taste tests of the beef it raised. Watson claimed to win nine out of ten times. Then Koch studied the grain and feed industries that supplied its feedlots. Watson worked with experts to study European farming methods because wheat farmers in Ukraine were far better at raising more grain on each acre of land than American farmers were. The Europeans had less acreage to work with, forcing them to be more efficient, and Koch learned how to replicate their methods. Koch bought a stake in a genetic engineering company to breed superyielding corn. Koch Agriculture extended into the milling and flour businesses as well. It experimented with building “micro” mills that would be nimbler than the giant mills operated by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. Koch worked with a start-up company that developed a “pixie dust” spray preservative that could be applied to pizza crusts, making crusts that did not need to be refrigerated. It experimented with making ethanol gasoline and corn oil. There were more abstract initiatives. Koch launched an effort to sell rain insurance to farmers who had no way to offset the risk of heavy rains. To do that, Koch hired a team of PhD statisticians to write formulas that correlated corn harvests with rain events, figuring out what a rain insurance policy should cost. At the same time, Koch’s commodity traders were buying contracts for corn and soybeans, learning more every day about those markets.