We have stood on the store floor before the executive team arrived, and sat in meetings where the pilot results looked promising and no one was quite sure what came next. We also built some of the approval processes we now help organisations take apart.
Andrew spent his career in retail operations and innovation before he started advising on it, on four continents and for two of the world's five largest retailers. He is the co-author of Retail Innovation Reframed and the author of the AI Readiness Gap essay. He writes from the store floor, and he still prefers it to the boardroom.
In the room he is usually the one asking what the people in stores will actually do on a Saturday afternoon.
Gareth is a retailer by career and a strategist by temperament. He is the co-author of Retail Innovation Reframed and co-creator of the Readiness Stack, and he has spent a long time helping retailers work out what comes after a promising pilot.
In the room he is usually the one asking what the business is actually for, and whether the answer would survive a busy week.
Retailers are good at execution. It is the thing the industry is built on, and it is the reason retail can absorb change faster than most sectors when the conditions are right. Our work is about the conditions: whether the purpose is clear enough to aim at, whether the people are ready to trust the change and be trusted with it, and whether there is a repeatable way to get from a promising pilot to something everybody uses.
We stay past the report. Through implementation, adoption, and the moments when the first version does not quite work. The engagement ends when the capability belongs to your team.
NRF Retail's Big Show in New York each January, where we run The Big Show Show and the Retail Safaris. Empower and the Australian Retailers Association at home. Kogan Page on the shelf. And The Uncommonist, our newsletter, in the inbox.
