It’s a Different Marketplace

The former CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly, made a recent comment that everyone in business should heed:

As reported by Fortune, Joly said the pandemic presented all businesses with, “a health crisis, an economic crisis, a societal crisis, a racial crisis, an environmental crisis.” This means that none of us — from those selling electronics from big box stores to one-person entrepreneurial start-ups — can justify “we’ve always done it that way” anymore.

My friend, Joe Calloway, has what I think is the all-time best definition of “success.” It means, he says: “You know what used to work.”

You may have read in one of my previous books that I question an entire generation of management training and thinking.

Right now, you can graduate from a prestigious institution with a Masters in Business Administration - yet not have completed a single course on customers (for example, how to deliver a customer experience, the value of customer retention, steps to leading higher levels of customer service, etc.) — much less be thoroughly educated on customer lifetime value’s impact on the bottom line.

Joly echoes my concern when he said, “So much of what I learned in business school is either wrong, dated, or at best incomplete.”