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Are you ready for an exercise in idea-swapping?
In a recent Harvard Business Review blog, Bill Taylor, cofounder of Fast Company magazine and coauthor of Mavericks at Work, wrote about a clever exercise in idea-swapping" thought up by the editors of Fortune magazine. According to Taylor, while assembling their annual "Best Companies to Work For" issue, the Fortune editors challenged Kip Tindell, cofounder and CEO of The Container Store and Maxine Clark, founder and CEO of Build-a-Bear Workshop to trade places for a day. What the leaders discovered after working on the front lines of each other's operations, writes Taylor, was "all kinds of ideas and merchandising, employee motivation, and in-store communication that worked in one place, and might just work in the other if those ideas were exported to and adapted for the new environment."
Taylor, whose new book Practically Radical will be published this fall, said he's "seen it time and time again: Leaders who are hungry for new ideas don't just aspire to learn from the 'best in class' in their narrowly defined field. They also aspire to learn from organizations outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change. Strategies and practices that are routine in one market segment can be revolutionary when they migrate to another, especially when those ideas challenge the prevailing assumptions that have come to define so many market segments."
What do you think? Would trading places with another business owner help you run your store better?
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Lori Smith, , Editor-in-Chief
Lori Smith is the editor of Gifts and Tablewares, Canada's premiere gifts and tablewares magazine. Written for retailers of gifts, tablewares, housewares, stationery and home furnishing accessories, its objective is to help readers increase their sales and run their businesses more profitably by providing information on new products, merchandising, small business management, customer service, consumer behavior and industry news. The magazine is published six times a year by BIG Magazines, LP, a leading Canadian information company.
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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on March 8, 2010 4:49 PM.
The previous post in this blog was Take a Tip from The Container Store: Treat Every Customer Like a Thirsty Man in a Desert.
The next post in this blog is The Emergence of Citizen Marketers.
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