Posts Tagged As Reward

Build a Growth Organization by Focusing On the Culture

Is your organization struggling to drive new innovation initiatives?  The culprit may be that your employees are too afraid to fail.  When talking with organizations I often hear the same refrain – we want our people to innovate but they won’t step forward to lead new innovation initiatives. Earlier this year I consulted with a company that was struggling with the same problem.  The organization had been around for over 25 years and just a couple of years earlier a new CEO was brought in from Silicon Valley.  The new CEO saw a lot of potential within the organization but too much of that potential was locked up behind department silos or trapped in the mindset of how things had always been done.  He wanted his people to be free to innovate and drive the next wave of ideas and opportunity for the organization but after two years he wasn’t seeing the results he had hoped for.

Continue Reading

Target Misses the Mark – a Failed Holiday Partnership With Neiman Marcus

The king of conservative retail, Target Corp, just had a rare sighting… a failure?  While Target might not be the most conservative retailer out there they certainly wouldn’t be considered a big risk taker.  In fact, just two years ago Target announced they were taking the huge leap into “international” retailing.  If you are keeping track that was a full 20 years after Wal-Mart opened its first international store, Mexico City, Mexico, in 1991!  Well, we are still waiting for the Target Canada stores to open in March/April 2013 but Target’s recent partnership with Neiman Marcus has officially been deemed a failure. See Time’s recent article titled Epic Retail Fail: Where Did the Target + Neiman Marcus Collection Go Wrong?

Continue Reading

Risk vs. Reward – How Compensation, Career Path, and Employment Stability Drive Innovation

For the better part of the last decade I had focused my career on driving innovation for Best Buy, a Fortune 100 retailer, and the undeniable king in the consumer electronics category.  When I joined the company I was focused on identifying innovative products and services that were specifically tailored for the needs of their newly identified customer segments.  I then joined a team where we focused on creating new concept and prototype stores and lead the team responsible for the Escape concept store in Chicago.  Eventually we shut down our two concept stores and I worked to reshape the team into an internal capability that could deliver new prototype stores (i.e. Best Buy Mobile), new retail models (i.e. Best Buy Express), and identify new growth product and service categories (i.e. Personal Transportation, Home Energy Management, and Health & Fitness).

Continue Reading

Signup for Matt's Periodic Updates

Receive periodic email updates from Matt Hunt including his published pieces, updates on his progress, and more!