Retail Dude

Last weekend I watched Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear, a movie which got critical acclaim from many of the film festivals that it has been shown. In the movie Amitabh Bachchan played a man living in the memories of his legendary Shakespearean performances, those impressive dialogues from the plays of Shakespeare were beautifully delivered by the bollywood king Amitabh. And those articulated words made me think about the lessons we as a retailers can learn from the Shakespeare, the lessons in leadership, management, conflict resolution and change management. Shakespeare clearly articulated human nature and relationships, and retail business business involves people, and people - fundamentally - don’t change. By studying Shakespeare’s works, it can allow you to gain insights on the each of the characters that you will encounter in your daily retail business life - from your customers, investors, consultants, vendors, distributors and other players.

Shakespeare looked deeply into what it takes to be a leader, and how leaders need to act under demanding and extreme circumstances. Leadership is not something that developed in last 40 years, Shakespeare demonstrated 400 years ago different roles a leader can take and different skills those leader require. and we all know without leadership any management or any organization will fall, so we need leader in every organization to carry its flag forward, those leader become the face of the organization like Kishor biyani for future group and Steve Jobs for Apple and there are lots many examples to quote, but i will like to quote something from Shakespears’s work -

When we have march’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard…

…So get you hence in peace; and tell the Dauphin
His jest will savour but of shallow wit,
When thousands weep more than did laugh at it.

The same aggression i can see in some of our retail players who are on store opening spree.

Apart from these lessons, one can learn the strategies also from the work of maestro, in Shakespeare’s play, King Henry V of England gained valuable information when he disguised himself and walked among his soldiers the night before a battle. Unlike the sugarcoated advice he got from his lieutenants, the leader didn’t always hear what he would have liked from the rank and file. AOL learned that lesson after an outside consultant said it was on the wrong track to increase sales. So AOL gave the consultant the reins and the result is the now successful Web network iVillage.com.

The same thing is there for the retailers where for the customer insight they have mystery shoppers, who can collect the data by pretending customer. Moreover we have many technologies now to track customer right from their entrance in the store to their happy check outs.

For the retailers in India there is a long road ahead and at every mile they have to learn new things and to apply them as to successfully march forward on their way. In my opinion if we can learn from Sam Walton, so we can from Shakespeare too.

-Prateek Katiyar

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