Remember that, in the end, the customer doesn't know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization - she or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.
There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization's overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow...It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.
If the store were your own business, you'd escort the customer to a product's location in the store and refer to the customer by name.
What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.
It is said if an organization listens to the complaint of a customer and the problem is fixed, the customer remains a loyal customer and tells approximately seven others about the experience. Conversely, if a person is ignored and the problem not fixed, that customer will not deal with that organization anymore and will tell approximately twenty other people about the negative experience.
After nearly 6,000 years of evidence on the subject, one thing stands clear: the people who end up as leaders in any organization, large or small, are often the craziest guys around.
From building a fire one can learn something about artistic composition. If you use only small kindling and large logs, the fire will quickly eat up the small pieces but will not become strong enough to attack the large ones. You must supply a scale of sizes from the smallest to the largest. The human eye also will not make its way into a painting or building unless a continuum of shapes leads from the small to the large, from the large to the small.
I grew up in a small village outside of Krakow, and when I was small we had only a small television, and we had only one and two programs. I remember it was black and white. And I loved to watch Charlie Chaplin. I was so small, but I remember his movement.
The bread which you use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.
There's only so much we can do from the home office to merchandise a store well. If you live in that community and work in that store, you know more about what you should be featuring and the actionality on an end cap than someone from Bentonville, Arkansas does.
President Obama shopped at a book store to help support Small Business Saturday. He bought fifteen books. His tax policies and his health care law have been so brutal on small businesses the only way they can survive is if he shops there personally.
Attempting to grapple with improving end-of-life care is a political third rail.
Sam Walton's values are: treat the customer right, take care of your people, be honest in your dealings, pass savings along to the customer, keep things simple, think small, control costs and continuously improve operations.
Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.
My father was placid and easygoing. He owned a small shoe store where I helped out on Saturdays. I think he'd have been pleased if I'd made a career of working in the shoe store. But my mother was ambitious. She encouraged us to read books, and she pushed us toward a musical education.
Sometimes when I walk into one of my own stores, I look at the display and say, "This looks so good - I want to buy it." Yet other times I walk in and the displays and mannequins will be all wrong, and I don't want to buy anything. When a customer walks into a store, she's looking for inspiration. So I'm tuned in to people, and I care about what they need and who they are.
Alzheimer's is a horrible thing. Some people are naive about it. They think, 'Oh it's just your memory,' but my mother was in terrible pain. Your body closes down. She didn't know if she'd eaten or if she wanted to eat. She couldn't remember how to walk. Towards the end, she didn't know us. It came gradually, then it got worse.