Company Blog

Change Revisited

by Adam Zack — September 23, 2015

If you’re not moving forward,
you’re standing still.

DW’s excellent column about conventional wisdom reminded me of the extreme importance of change in the food business. A grocery store is like a shark – it has to keep moving or it will die, literally. The biggest obstacle to change is indeed “conventional wisdom”. It takes strong and visionary leadership to get the old guard to keep innovating and changing to meet the changing needs of our customers. I think if all of us had a buck for every time someone said “Um, well that’s how we’ve always done it” we’d be buying that vacation beach house.

I was speaking with a prospective new client yesterday who I have really come to like and enjoy talking to. We were discussing the challenges of getting multiple members of leadership of a store chain to agree and to make decisions that result in some serious changes in their marketing and how much of a chore that is. You can have great ideas and vision, but without anyone buying in and actually implementing change, you only have stagnation. You have status quo. You have conventional wisdom. You may be maintaining your status quo and doing a great job at it, but if you’re not moving forward, you’re standing still. That may be fine for the short-term, but I tell you what, your competition is not standing still. (Well some are -the ones with the excellent conventional wisdom). They are finding ways to move forward. You may be miles ahead of them today, but if they are moving forward, even at the pace of a tortoise, they will eventually catch and pass you. Every time.

So the challenge to your team is “What have we done new this week?” It just takes one thing a week – it could help sales, decrease costs or enhance customer service, but if you’re not asking at your manager meetings then it surely isn’t being done. Conventional wisdom says so.