Towards Your Personal Insight & Growth Toolkit

Catherine, the head of a global retailer had been sweating it for months. Investors and markets were not optimistic on the sector’s outlook. For a while, she had positioned the company she runs as an outlier, a growth machine despite the massive changes in shopping behavior and the media stories about closing thousands of retail shopfronts across America. At present, it would seem the trends were catching up with them. They had just announced a round of layoffs and store closings and the sale of a specialized retail arm. Numbers were down for the third quarter in a row. Catherine needed to pull something out of a hat. She needed to switch on growth.

Looking at Labs

The realization came during a conference she attended at the MIT Media Lab. She had not planned to go but last minute, she found 3 hours in her schedule and felt like taking a breather from all the taxing issues and just go to the well. They say MIT is like a firehose. The Media Lab has the additional distinction of being where Nicolas Negroponte wrote his bestseller Being Digital, the book that started the massive shift towards digitalization across all sectors of industry.

The event was on The Future of Tech, Analytics and Consumers. Catherine found the topic and speakers enthralling. Particularly, there was one speaker from MIT who truly had seen the light. Her experiments showed that shoppers increasingly wanted to co-create the products they ended up buying and promoting. Fascinating. She was reminded of one of the corollaries of sales: you sell more if you truly embrace the mindset that you are helping people you are not selling. People need and want help and might even appreciate it. The reward for helping is to spend. In the end, everyone wants to feel good about themselves. With digitalization their input can become scalable, truly transformational for product development. But users and customers also want to be involved in the creative process. They want to be product developers themselves. They want to have impact. What is better than feeling that you are having an impact and working with a global retail brand? Catherine saw the potential, but didn’t quite see how she could get there, given her balance sheet obstacles of the moment. She needed more than a 3-hour breather. She needed help herself.

Few people are both thinkers and makers of companies, products, and high-value services on a global scale. Those who are, can usually be found in history books, memoires, and biographies. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Edison spring to mind. The challenge is this: everybody else has access to the general information about these heroes of modern science and technology. In order to excel, you either need to dig deeper into what created those minds, or you need to tap into different insight, a few layers down, slightly more invisible to the general public.

How does growth work these days? How can you tap into it? The answer many companies turn to is two-fold: inside-out and outside-in. One, better understand your own business including digging out better analytics from your own data. Two, better understand the environment using external sources, partners, startups, and university relationships, focusing on trends, research, or foresight.

Seeking new sources of growth is typically new and challenging. It forces companies to re-think received wisdom. It hurts. What one finds may even invalidate the experience of senior leaders within the business. Some don not catch up. Some resist. Either way, it is painful. But some companies do not even get there and are poised for perennial decline. What characterizes those who do not, those who face change head on? Here’s what Catherine did. She turned to her organization for answers and she openly solicited outside assistance, quietly, but not invisibly.

Tapping into Trends

Tracking retail used to be straightforward. If you have your own retail operation, there is a constant stream of input feeding in from sales, marketing, operations and the point of sale. Tracking trends would mean following the main industry associations, attending a few key events every year and talking to colleagues and competitors informally throughout the year. Trends would shift every year or sometimes seasonally, two of four times a year at the most. Megatrends would last for decades. According to industry analysts and marketing firms, the most salient trends are always tied to a generation. Millennials over the last decade. Post-millennials if you sell to young people today. Anyhow, it is quite structured.

Let us for a moment look at how this would look. Let us assume we think trade associations, research firms and academia all have something to offer.

Trusting Trade Associations

The National Retail Federation (NRF), the world's largest retail trade association, might be one starting point. Its members include department stores, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, and independent retailers, chain restaurants, and grocery stores. NRF’s resources include regular events and white papers intended for members or for lobbying. However, NRF’s perspective is obviously slanted towards making the sector look good and one cannot expect to find perspectives that go against industry interests there and certainly not negative news such as opinions on which retail sub-sectors might have the worst growth prospects. They clearly want to keep their members. It is also only one side of the story from one source.

Contacting Consultants

McKinsey, the top strategy consultant, may be another starting point. You could choose to browse their free content on the subject of retail online. Their online site does have quite a bit of content, so that is promising. Very rapidly, however, you reach a paywall. Your only option then is to contact them for a million-dollar project looking into the sector for you.

Asking an Expert

Asking an expert is another favored approach. As it used to be, you had to call the consultant you had on retainer, or lacking that, call the local university and ask a professor what he thought about the issue. Failing that, of course, make a call to your own network of peers, connections, alums, friends or colleagues, anybody you knew that might have an inkling and who might have a moment to spare to discuss.

Over the last decade, a flurry of open innovation platforms has emerged, places like GLG, Catalant, or Yegii, where you can contact an expert on demand who will answer your question for $100, take a call for $500 or take on a project for $1000 or $10,000, depending. Common with most of these approaches is that you tap into a wider net of experts, pay a bounty and get advice from the experts in the crowds surrounding an issue.

For example, Santander asked Yegii: Will emerging technology such as cryptocurrency reshape banking? What should a bank do to prepare? What is the upside? What is the downside risk? Santander, in collaboration with Yegii, selected experts in a rigorous three stage process. In phase 1, 35 experts contributed, including CEOs, top tier university professors, technologists, data scientists, banking professionals, and consultants. In phase 2, 28 experts continued honing in on the issues. In phase 3, a team of 4 experts, each with 15 years’ experience, crafted a report with input from senior leadership from a global bank, and under supervision by Yegii's staff. Yegii’s report examines the potential uses of cryptocurrency networks, including Bitcoin and Ripple, from a banker’s perspective, spells out the business case, and offers recommended steps to adoption.

Grinding it alone using Google

What if you instead looked for the highest quality online content in retail? You might imagine doing a Google search for Retail Trends, for example. Without any further qualification, the about 244,000,000 results (at the time of writing) would mean you would spend the next few hours sifting through pages and pages even among the first few hundred results, aimlessly searching for keywords and brands or other known indicators of relevance and quality. The first few hits would be ads, i.e. proceed carefully and only if you know the brand. The next few hits would be sites that are search engine optimized (SEO) and typically either large brands with huge resources or small niche publications that have gamed Google with artificially elevated inbound links relevant to your search topic. Obviously, somebody with great search engine user skills would be able to further dissect results based on an optimal combo of keywords, i.e. Retail AND trends AND technology AND pdf, for instance, but this is cumbersome and fraught with the risk of missing important documents.

Many research and consulting firms have retail divisions and some are retail only. Judging from the top hits on Google, one might think Deloitte, KPMG, or PwC are leaders in the space, as each issued their annual Retail Trends publications. However, be watchful. There are four kinds of search results possible. The first is simply a marketing page tooting the horn of their expertise in the area, which is only marginally helpful and would mean you need to search around more or pay up for an actual project. The second is a promotional white paper, typically between two and five pages, which typically does have some insight and even some figures. If you look into it, it is also just a shopfront and typically names individual experts at the end of the white paper for further elaboration or leads you to a download page where you may need to buy the full report. The third search result leads to an abstract or summary of a report which you then are asked to buy a license to read. There are two such pages, vendor pages such as Gartner or Forrester or third-party providers such as Research and Markets that give access to reports from many vendors but where you may not know which vender you are buying from until you have paid for the report. The fourth result is the home run, the full text report laid out in 30-100+ pages where somebody deploys a content marketing approach and has invested in some amount of work for a high quality yet free product. Many of the best reports of this kind are annual. These vendors are thoughtful about building a reputation as a knowledge provider over time.

Regardless which kind of publication or offering you are looking at and intend to let influence your next step, you had better assess the motivations of the source. Industry positioning strategies of vendors in this area include visibility, thought leadership or also more activist strategies such as wanting to shape the industry in some desired direction.

Is Insight the only missing piece?

The connection between tapping into insight and switching on growth is often assumed without any evidence, which is a mistake. One cannot simply take for granted that seeking insight leads to insight or that having insight itself leads to the kinds of actions that generate growth. For one, there is the challenge of execution. This is where most expertise based approaches typically fail and have failed in the past.

One cannot simply take for granted that seeking insight leads to insight or that having insight itself leads to the kinds of actions that generate growth.

This is how it goes. Reasonably good advice is given, often at a hefty price from a top tier strategy consultant. Having listened to a presentation about what to do and not remembering much from such a presentation, you are left with the slide deck. The advice appears in the form of a slide deck with recommendations. Some time goes by, and you implement absolutely nothing. Not because you do not want to or do not understand what to do. You are not alone in the decision, perhaps, and time goes by and other more pressing challenges push the current one lower on the priority list. You may think you understand what is meant by a recommendation, as well, and then when you implement, you may or may not realize that you are not at all working on the right problem.

The context of the challenge may have shifted ever so slightly or simply the process of interpreting the solution to the challenge means you are doing something else than originally intended.

Insight is, in itself, a problematic concept. What does it mean to have insight? Does it mean to know something better than those around you? If so, how do you explain it to a wider group, even your own team? What is insight without action? In my first book, I explored acts of persuasion which often requires sustained co-presence and momentum as well as numerous props, allies, and fortuitous circumstances as well as a sudden open window of opportunity. You need to jump through it before the window closes.

Acts of persuasion often require sustained co-presence and momentum as well as numerous props, allies, and fortuitous circumstances as well as a sudden open window of opportunity

Subscribing to Sources

Many consultants I know, and an increasing number of corporate technologists and strategists, subscribe to publications that cover specific topics related to their job: world newspapers, business publications, industry blogs, news about their current and past clients along with their competitors. For some time, the way to go would seem to be a technology called Rich Site Summary (often called Really Simple Syndication), now commonly known simply by its abbreviation, i.e. RSS, or indeed a “web feed” if you prefer the food analogy. The point is when online content is set up or delivered also in this particular way, it allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator. The whole online content marketing industry is built on this foundation which makes it easier to appear like you are an important player in the news or knowledge ecosystem as an intermediary who chooses what to present as the most relevant at any given time or indeed becomes a news agency, a “Reuters” in their own field. The popularity of RSS has had its ups and downs. Nowadays, most users do not have to even think of RSS because news is fed to them through the platforms they are part of. LinkedIn News, for example builds on a combination of RSS and user generated content.

Is there a way to escape Technology Fads?

Technology fads are common. They get created by virtue of the fact that when media and investors jointly get excited about a space, they bring along other for the ride who may or may not be fully aware of the underlying logic at play. Investors, in turn, get disappointed by the return on investment. Media, by its very own logic, needs to move on to a new topic even if they are still, deep down, enamored by the second latest, most favored topic. Time and again, this has happened to Nanotech, Cleantech, Edtech, Medtech, and AI. In fact, probably it has, in some way, happened to all technologies. How to stay up to date without being blinded by passing fads? To be explored in further columns...