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What Best Buy could learn from David Bowie

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On the 10th of January 2012 The Next Web noted how "David Bowie’s 2002 predictions about the future of music were pretty close". Bowie predicted, in 2002, that "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it".

image from www.sweetslyrics.com

Furthermore, as he rounded out his predictions he said something which really struck me, just as powerful as the predictions themselves:

"But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen".

The day before, in Forbes, Larry Downes wrote about Best Buy (The People vs. Best Buy, Round Two) where he described the reaction to his first article Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually.

The responses to my article could, in the hands of the right senior executives, form the playbook for a compelling new strategy for Best Buy, one that could do far more than simply preserve the company’s existing market share. But rather than drink in all that free advice, the company’s responses simply wish it away. It’s more denial, now tinged with a dose of anger. According to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s classic psychiatric study, for a patient with a terminal diagnosis those are the first and second stages of grief.

In many years (OK, many, many years) as an entrepreneur, investor, and consultant working with Fortune 500 companies, I’ve found there are two kinds of senior executives. There are those who see mistakes as an opportunity to improve their business and those who waste their energy explaining away real problems.

Downes outlines reason after reason why best Buy needs to change, and how nothing they can do can change the progressions which are happening, for example:

  • Online competitors are certainly part of Best Buy’s problem, but not for the reasons it thinks. What’s really going on is more basic. Best Buy just doesn’t understand its customers’ point of view.
  • What I meant was that consumers easily adapt to alternative retail channels.  Before the Internet, there was catalog shopping and home shopping from television. For consumers, buying online was just the next step in an obvious progression of more convenient ways to buy.
  • For brick-and-mortar retailers, however, the shift was jarring.  Moving online required new thinking, new management structures, and new strategies.
  • To compete successfully against new online retailers, traditional retailers would also need to find ways to transform the expensive liabilities of physical locations with limited hours and high labor and inventory costs into assets that complemented rather than competed with the online experience.

Best Buy's leadership team's reaction, from what we see, is to create PR "crisis management" scripts for its staff, respond in rote, dig in, and deny. Nothing usual I suppose.

What is unusual is that David Bowie saw beyond his entire livelihood, his total current world view, and was able to articulate and to acknowledge its demise:

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again".

Astounding really. Best Buy need David Bowie's help, don't you think?

Let's run over that quote from David Bowie once again:

"But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen".

How do you break strong leadership teams out of their mindsets?

How do you demonstrate the "reality" which they cannot see?

What are the keys to action and follow-through and not just acknowledgement?

Please comment below.

Walter @adamson
http://xeeme.com/walter


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