Jimmy Kimmel: Costco Etiquette

What's the Best Incentive Compensation Strategy for Salespeople?

Harvard Business School Professors Doug Chung and Das Narayandas have conducted an interesting new study about compensation schemes for salespeople.  They conducted a field experiment with a Swedish electronics retailer.   The firm used a monthly quota system to motivate and reward salespeople.   The scholars tested the effect of shifting to a daily quota system.  What did they find? Overall revenue increased with the installation of a daily quota system. HBS Working Knowledge summarizes their conclusions:

They found that sales productivity increased by 4.9 percent, on aggregate, under the daily quota scheme. But the results were more dramatic among the lowest quartile of salespeople—those with the worst recent sales records in the company. That group saw an 18 percent increase in sales productivity under the daily quota.

Chung explains that low performers are susceptible to falling behind in a monthly quota scheme, becoming less motivated or less capable of meeting their quota the further they fall back. “So they just give up,” he says.

A daily quota, on the other hand, provides “a fresh start every day in which past performance does not affect current payoff and thus does not disturb current motivation,” the researchers write. “For high-performing salespeople, because they are more immune to the disutility of effort, even if they experienced bad luck earlier in the month, they would put in the additional effort necessary later in the month to meet their monthly quotas.”

However, this finding is not the end of the story.  The scholars also examined the type of products that these employees sold before and after the change in quota scheme.  As it turns out, the retailer sold many more low-priced goods with the new quota scheme, but fewer higher-priced, higher margin items.  Why?  The higher-priced items took more time to sell.  Thus, the daily quota system created a powerful incentive to push the items that were easiest to sell (the low-priced goods).  

What's the lesson of this story?  You have to decide what your strategic objectives are.  If you want volume, a more frequent quota makes sense.  If you are interested in being very successful at the high end of the market, then you do not want the quotas to be as short term in nature.  

Sears Acknowledges Possibility of Bankruptcy

Many of us have been predicting the demise of Sears for years.  The writing has been on the wall now for quite some time - falling sales, declining customer satisfaction, and many store closings.  Fortune reported this week that Sears is admitting (finally) that bankruptcy is a possibility. Phil Wahba of Fortune writes:

Sears Holdings has recognized for the first time that many people think the retailer is not long for this world.  In its annual report released on Tuesday, the retailer, which owns Sears and Kmart, said that its years-long sales declines, "indicate substantial doubt exists related to the Company's ability to continue as a going concern." In other words, many think Sears will go under.

Amazingly, Sears has lost nearly $10 billion in the last six years.  How long can they continue to sustain such losses?  Could they be headed to liquidation, not simply a restructuring under Chapter 11? Some think that may be the case.  For me, Sears represents what Harvard Business School Professor Jay Lorsch once described as a "gradual crisis."  Lorsch argued that firms struggle mightily when a threat emerges gradually and unfolds over lengthy periods of time.  They can find themselves rationalizing the threat and avoiding the hard truths.  No single event causes them to shake things up and shift direction in a major way.  By the time they begin to truly confront the threat, it's too late. They find themselves far behind the times, or simply unable to transform the organization that is so set in its ways.  

How Does Information Flow & Collaboration Take Place?

Becoming More Resilient

Maria Konnikova wrote a terrific article for The New Yorker last year, focusing on the research on resilience over the past few decades.   Konnikova describes the research conducted by developmental psychologist Emmy Werner.  Konnikova summarizes a key finding:

Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Then Konnikova turns to the research conducted by George Bonanno, a Columbia University psychologist.  She writes: 

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience, including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

Konnikova concludes by reporting that scholars believe that people can change the way that they frame events in their lives.  They can be trained to reframe potentially traumatic events as positive ones.  If that is true, then we can actually become more resilient.  We are not destined to always act the way that we have acted in the face of potential adversity.  

Great Interview Question!

On Friday, I moderated a panel discussion at Bryant University's 20th Annual Women's Summit.   One audience member asked the panelists to describe their favorite interview question.  Gerardine Ferlins, founder and CEO of Cirtronics (a contract manufacturer based in New Hampshire), explained her favorite line of inquiry.  She asks job candidates to think of someone that they admire professionally... perhaps a former manager or colleague.  Then she asks the candidates to describe the characteristics and qualities of that person.  Ferlins explained that this question tends to tell you a great deal about the candidate.  In short, they often describe themselves!  They select someone who has the types of qualities that they think are most important.  You learn a great deal about someone's values, beliefs, and priorities when you ask this question.   In short, this interview question builds on the old adage:  You can tell a lot about a person by the friends they keep.   

Write Your Company's Obituary

James Allen, co-leader of Bain Consulting's global strategy practice, has written a good article for the Wall Street Journal about how firms can avoid the fate of once-proud industry leaders such as Sears, Blockbuster, Circuit City, Research in Motion, and many others.  Allen starts by referring to a personal development exercise that many individuals have been asked to conduct at some point in their careers:  writing your own obituary.   The exercise is meant to clarify your priorities and objectives, and help you rediscover your true purpose and passion.  Allen argues that firms might take a similar approach.  Executives might try to write their company's obituary.  Here is an excerpt from his article: 

The same exercise can help CEOs determine what their organizations need to live a productive life, and what could lead to an untimely death. CEOs should imagine they are business journalists, writing a postmortem on how the company began a slide toward oblivion—how it lost its leadership position, was targeted by an activist investor or acquired by a company with a more successful business model. What were the likely causes? Which factors in the downfall were knowable but not seen or addressed by executives? Which former strengths became fatal weaknesses? What could senior leaders have done differently to position the company for success?  These theoretical obituaries would vary greatly in detail, but I suspect they will include a common thread: The natural life cycle of many companies goes from insurgency to incumbency to struggling bureaucracy to replacement by the next wave of insurgents.

Hootsuite's Czar of Bad Systems

Source: Wikipedia

Ryan Holmes, CEO of social media platform Hootsuite, has written a terrific article for Fast Company about the latest management initiative at his firm.   Holmes begins by recounting the story of one employee who became frustrated with the approval process required to send one customer a Hootsuite t-shirt as a gift.   The t-shirt cost $15.  The employee spent hours tracking people down to get the appropriate approvals.  That example may sound a bit crazy, but every organization has cumbersome, bureaucratic procedures that frustrate people who are just trying to get the job done.  These processes may have started out with good intent, but they evolve to the point where they make little sense in many circumstances.  Moreover, these types of processes tend to centralize decision-making authority over time.  They take away autonomy from the people on the front lines trying to get the work done.  Processes never die.  They almost always grow and become more complex.  

Hootsuite set out to change that dynamic.    One individual has taken on the unofficial position of "Czar of Bad Systems."  Holmes writes, "Our employees now have a go-to person who can take an objective look at processes that have outlived their usefulness. If people have a problem they can’t fix, even with help from their manager, they reach out to the Czar. In the past, these processes would’ve fallen through the cracks–they’d be cursed at but ultimately complied with. Now there’s hope that they might actually be corrected."  

Why do bad processes emerge in organizations?  Holmes explains, "Interestingly, most bad processes seem to boil down to a few common failings: needless complexity, unanticipated bottlenecks, or irrational fear of worst-case scenarios."  I would add one significant reason for bad processes: the desire by certain managers and executives to amass power and authority.  Simply put, some managers want the right to approve or reject certain decisions because it gives them power over others, and it helps justify their existence in the organization.  What these managers fail to do is put themselves in the shoes of those trying to do the work.  They don't appreciate the frustrations that they have created.  Moreover, they often do not understand how much they have slowed down the organization.  When approaching these types of processes, managers need to put themselves in the shoes of those on the front lines.  They need to stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about those whom they should be serving.  

Managerial Career Concerns & Risk Aversion

When we try to understand corporate strategy decisions, we should examine the factors affecting the way executives approach key situations. Specifically, we should seek to comprehend how career concerns might shape strategic choices. Consider the research of Todd Gormley and David Matsa. They conducted an interesting study of over 2,220 firms in which managers learned that government officials had identified something used in their manufacturing process as a carcinogen. The scholars analyzed the strategic choices that followed this discovery.  Here is what they found, according to a summary of the research published by Kellogg Insight. 

“They started buying other firms,” says Matsa. Discovering that their workers had been exposed to a carcinogen was linked to a 6% increase in acquisitions. But critically, acquiring these companies didn’t actually create any value for shareholders. That’s because, rather than making more strategic purchases, the troubled firms overpaid for large and unrelated “cash cows”—firms whose healthy profits might offset any future payouts the company would have to make.

“We likened it to how tobacco firms diversified into food when the health risks of smoking became more pronounced legally,” says Matsa. (Consider, as the most famous example, Phillip Morris’ acquisition of Kraft Foods in 1988.) “The managers were looking for a way to reduce risk.”

Matsa and Gormley argued that that the managers pursued this strategy to reduce their personal exposure. Because their compensation was closely tied to the firm’s performance, their own finances would have been disproportionately hit by the firm’s collapse. And because a catastrophe would likely cost them their jobs, their careers also hung in jeopardy.

Similarly, they studied firms which operated in states that made it difficult for companies to execute hostile takeovers.  They described these firms as "protected" in that managers did not face a high risk of being displaced/terminated by another company undertaking a hostile takeover.   Here is what the research demonstrated about the strategic choices made by these executives in "protected" situations: 

Moreover, just as seen in the previous study, these managers actively reduced risk by pursuing safe, diversification-focused acquisitions. Their firms undertook 27% more acquisitions compared with unprotected businesses—with two-thirds of these transactions diversifying the firms into new industries rather than building on existing strengths. Disproportionately, the firms targeted “cash cows.”  And their caution negatively impacted their companies’ value, investments, and growth. “These incremental acquisitions destroy shareholder value on average,” Matsa says.

Celebrating Failure at Drug Companies

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about the pharmaceutical industry on Saturday. In this article, they described a new type of party being held at some firms:

After making the difficult decision to scrap a once-promising drug program, the biotech firm Ironwood Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Mass., did something unusual: It gathered to celebrate. With dozens of staffers in attendance, the “drug wake” at Ironwood featured seven-layer dip, homemade cupcakes and a bittersweet send-off. “It’s hard to say goodbye, so I won’t,” said Mark Charest, who works on regulatory affairs at the company. “I’ll say, ‘Thank you—thank you to the peptide.’ ”

The article describes how firms are holding these types of events to prevent researchers from becoming discouraged after lengthy efforts that do not lead to a product that can go to market.  It also describes how companies are conducting extensive after-action reviews to capture the learning from these failed drug discovery efforts.  Finally, they want to avoid excessive risk aversion; they want people to take risks in hopes of discovering the next highly effective drug.  

I would argue that these efforts also de-stigmatize failure and perhaps help people make the tough decision to stop a research effort and cut their losses.   We know that the sunk cost trap can cause researchers and managers to throw good money and effort after bad in the drug discovery process. By minimizing the stigma of failure, perhaps these firms can make it a bit easier for people to cut their losses.  In the end, that will lead to a much more efficient use of resources at these firms.  

Whole Foods Inside of Target?

Brian Sozzi of TheStreet.com has reported in recent days rather extensively about Target's disappointing financial results.   Target experienced a 1.5% decline in same store sales in the most recent quarter, while rival Wal-Mart produced a 1.8% gain in same-store sales.  Moreover, Target missed earnings estimates this quarter, and the firm decreased its estimates for 2017 earnings.  Sozzi has some interesting ideas as to how the firm might turn things around.  For instance, he's focused on the grocery part of the business, noting that Target must decide who it wants to be with regard to the food portion of the stores.   Sozzi proposes one solution that might startle some observers:

Food sales represent more than 20% of Target's business, and it's vital it finally gets this business right. Same-store sales were pressured throughout last year, as the company battled with pricing strategies in a competitive backdrop. Further, Target continues to deal with not having a broad enough assortment in fresh categories such as fruit, vegetables and meat and deli (would like it if they sold some fresh fish and more grab-and-go sandwiches at my local Target, for example). 

The retailer has to decide whether it wants to be a grocery store and, if so, how it could do it more effectively. Becoming a successful grocer could lift sales throughout the store. As I have said in the past, Target should consider outsourcing its grocery department to a Whole Foods (using its new 365 value banner) in the same fashion as it outsourced its pharmacy business to CVS Health. Let someone with the expertise in food service handle the business, freeing up Target to focus on what it does best -- higher quality general merchandise vs. Walmart at good prices.

I certainly find the concept intriguing.  By all accounts, Target made a wise decision to outsource its pharmacy business to CVS Health.   It did not have the same capabilities as CVS, and yet, having a strong pharmacy in the store had important benefits in terms of building foot traffic.  CVS made for a perfect partner.  However, the Whole Foods partnership raises some questions.  Yes, Whole Foods offers strong capabilities in the grocery business.  However, Whole Foods has a very premium image, and it is known for high prices ("Whole Paycheck").  Yes, Target hopes to differentiate itself from Wal-Mart and offer a premium shopping experience for guests.  Is Whole Foods a bit too far in that direction though?  Will it turn off shoppers looking for good value (Expect More, Pay Less)?  Sozzi recommends using the new 365 value banner from Whole Foods, but that store concept is not yet proven.   Perhaps more importantly, Whole Foods is facing many struggles of its own right now, both trying to reinvigorate its flagship stores as well as launch the 365 stores.   CVS Health was a strong, high performing partner for Target.  Is it the right moment to partner with a firm such as Whole Foods, given the challenges that the grocer is facing at the moment?   Finally, outsourcing 20% of your business is a far different decision than shifting the small pharmacy unit to CVS Health.  Sozzi certainly raises an interesting idea though, and I'm sure others will press Target's management to consider similar moves if same-stores sales growth does not improve.  

Can Uber Recover?

By now, everyone has read about the serious problems at Uber.  On February 19, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post in which she described serious transgressions by managers at the firm, including sexual harassment.  Soon, newspaper accounts documented a culture that appeared to be out of control.   CEO Travis Kalanick has tried to address the situation, though his early moves have been met with criticism.  He appointed a panel to investigate the situation, but people have objected by noting that all three members are essentially "insiders" at the firm.  Kalanick himself has been criticized for comments in the past that have contributed to the dysfunctional culture.   

Can Uber recover from this fiasco?  Will there be lasting damage?  I see several potential long term negative consequences for Uber.  First, Uber will have a challenging time attracting top talent moving forward, particularly highly successful female engineers and managers.   Why would they wish to work for a firm with this reputation?  Talent acquisition and retention will be a problem for Uber, no matter the promise of financial rewards that they may offer.  Second, investors may begin to scrutinize Uber more closely.  Will they tolerate the huge losses and be as patient as they have been while Uber forsakes profits for aggressive growth?  Third, will corporate governance change?  Will the Board members begin to recognize their own vulnerability here, and will they start asking tougher questions?  Management could face a very different environment in future Board meetings.  

How can Uber recover?  They have to address multiple issues very quickly.  First, they have to insure that the outside review truly is objective.  Perception is reality.  If people perceive the current appointees as insiders who cannot be objective, it will be difficult to persuade people that the conclusions of the review are valid.  Second, they must confront and remove employees who engaged in unethical or even illegal behavior immediately.  Now is not the time for second and third chances.  People have to be held accountable.  Third, Uber must address how it evaluates and rewards employees.  Excusing the inappropriate behavior of brilliant jerks must end.  People must be evaluated and rewarded not simply on the results they achieve, but how they go about achieving them.  Fourth, Kalanick must address his own behavior and past comments.  He has to acknowledge his own culpability in molding and shaping this dysfunctional culture.  Moreover, he has to be very transparent as the review is conducted and changes are made.   Next, the company must address various informal rituals (the push-ups, for example) that have evolved over the years at the firm.  Are these rituals productive?  Should they be stopped? What new rituals should emerge?  Finally, Uber has to redefine the core values for which it stands.  The company is known for its 14 cultural values.  The company has to take a hard look at those values.  Are they the right values?  Have the current values enabled some unintended, but dangerous, behaviors and attitudes?   The company needs to think hard about the message that each value sends... and recognize the ways in which it has enabled bad behavior on the part of many managers. 

Disturbing Finding on Happiness

Knowledge@Wharton reports on the intriguing, but perhaps rather disturbing, findings of Professor Maurice Schweitzer's latest research.   Schweitzer has studied how people perceive others who appear to be very happy people.  He explains the conclusions from the research:

The pursuit of happiness is deeply embedded in our national thinking. Yet sometimes people who are very happy are exactly the kinds of people who are exploited. That’s what we document in our research, where we look at people who are very happy. If they seem more happy than baseline happiness — people who are very happy, always chipper, always upbeat — they strike us as naive. We found that link consistently. One of the most robust findings in our research is that people see very happy individuals as naive, and in our last couple of studies we found that people are more likely to exploit those individuals.

I don't think the implication is that we should be less happy, or stop presenting ourselves as satisfied and content with our lives, jobs, etc.   However, perhaps we need to open our eyes a bit, and recognize that others may perceive us as naive at times.  Unfortunately, some people may try to take advantage of perceived naivete.  

Why Do We Make Recommendations to Others?

Why do we make recommendations to others?  Are we simply being altruistic?  Are we trying to help our friends, perhaps by sharing information and knowledge that we have acquired so that others can avoid the mistakes we have made?  New research suggests that another key motivation may drive our desire to recommend products and services to others.  Scholars Andrea Bonezzi, Alessandro Peluso, Matteo Deangelis, and Derek Rucker have conducted a series of experimental studies that challenge our assumptions about the motivations behind recommendations.  

In their studies, they examined how people chose the amount and type of automobile insurance to purchase.  This task often proves challenging and difficult for many consumers.  The scholars found that individuals are more likely to offer advice to others if they feel insecure about the decision themselves.  In short, people have a need for control.  When they feel a loss of control or experience a sense of insecurity, they try to regain control by offering recommendations to others.  It bolsters their view of themselves after the task itself has threatened their self-perceptions.   Of course, these findings do not mean that the recommendations provided by these individuals are worthless or counterproductive.  It does, however, suggest that companies should understand what truly drives people's behavior when trying to encourage recommendations and word-of-mouth advertising of their products and services.  It also might mean that we should take recommendations with a grain of salt when the purchasing decision is highly complicated and stressful.  

Algorithm Aversion: How Can We Overcome It?

Algorithms can help us make better decisions in a variety of situations.  However, human beings tend to have an aversion to using algorithms.  They trust their gut more than the computer, even though the algorithms may lead to better decisions. Knowledge@Wharton reports on a stream of fascinating research by Cade Massey, Joseph Simmons, and Berkeley J. Dietvorst.  They found that you can persuade people to use algorithms if you give them a choice as to whether to use the algorithm or not.  In other words, don't force them to use it; make them feel a sense of control.  That will help convince them to choose the algorithm.  However, many people stop using the algorithm after some period of time, because they become frustrated with the mistakes that the computer makes.  Of course, the computer might make fewer mistakes than a human using intuition, but people don't recognize that possibility. Instead, they fixate on the mistakes and lose faith in the algorithm. Simmons points out, "People want algorithms to be perfect and expect them to be perfect, even though what we really want is for them to simply be a little better than the humans."

The scholars also found that you could persuade people to use the algorithms if you gave them an ability to adjust the computer's recommendation slightly.   Of course, the algorithm's predictions and recommendations become less accurate when humans intervene in this manner.  However, the researchers found that you only have to give people an ability to adjust the algorithm slightly to enhance adoption.   Providing them an ability to adjust more substantially does not increase adoption more than offering a slight adjustment possibility.  Thus, you might be willing to tolerate a bit of degradation in the algorithm's accuracy simply because giving people some sense of control increases adoption of the computer-assisted decision-making system.  For more on this research, see the video below in which Massey and Simmons are interviewed about the research.  

Should I Tell That Joke at Work?

The Wall Street Journal has a nice summary of recent research on humor in the workplace written by scholars Alison Wood Brooks and T. Bradford Bitterly.   The scholars point out some of the positive effects of humor in the workplace.  For instance, they cite one study by Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock.  Here is the summary of those findings:

Research led by Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock at VU University Amsterdam studied how patterns of humor in conversation—such as a joke followed by another joke or a joke followed by laughter—predicted other types of communication, as well as team performance, more broadly. The researchers found that teams that tell more jokes and laugh together also made more supportive and constructive statements to each other, things like “that’s a great idea” or “we could solve this problem by doing X.” That, in turn, led them to perform better on a number of measures, such as hitting goals and improving efficiency. The researchers surmised that humor could improve team interaction by triggering positive forms of communication.

Of course, one always worries about the inappropriate use of humor in the workplace. Will you offend someone?  Could you cross the line and face disciplinary action for something you say?  Could it even get you fired?   The problem, according to researchers, is that we are not very good predictors of what others will find to be funny.  In fact, we aren't good predictors even when we know the person quite well.  Here's one study that examined this situation:

In a recent study led by Michael Yeomans at Harvard University, pairs of museum-goers were asked to predict what their companion would find funny. Many of the pairs included married couples, or people who had known each other for years. Even with the close connection between people, Dr. Yeomans found that they weren’t very good at predicting what their partner would find funny. A statistical prediction model turned out to be much better at rating how funny their companion would rate a joke.

Why People Quit

Why do people quit their jobs?  Fast Company reported this week on a new analysis conducted by Glassdoor.   The firm studied approximately 5,000 workers who switched jobs over the past decade.   They found that three most important reasons for quitting are:

• Company culture
• Employee salary
• Getting stuck in the same job for long periods of time

The firm discovered that, "On average, we find that a 10% higher base pay is associated with a 1.5% higher chance that a worker will stay at the company for their next role."  In addition, the probability of quitting rises by 1% for every 10 extra months someone stays in the same role at a company. 

What didn't matter as much with regard to quitting?  Interestingly, "they found that while work-life balance, liking their senior leadership, and benefits may matter for overall employee satisfaction, they don’t impact turnover."

Marketing Your Products as Designed by Users: Benefit or Hindrance?

The Boston Globe reported this weekend on the fascinating new research of Vienna University Professor Martin Schreier.   He studied the marketing of crowdsourced products.  Schreier found that marketing an item as user-designed tended to increase sales more than marketing a product as created by a firm's own designers.  Why this positive effect?  Schreier discovered that, "People believe their peers understand their needs better, and therefore, come up with better solutions."   Moroever, Schreier found that people tend to react more positively if informed that the user-designers had something in common with them.   For instance, female consumers tended to prefer user-designers who were women similar to them.  

Is there a potential downside to marketing a product as "user-designed"?  Schreier found that the effect does not appear to be positive for luxury items or high tech goods.  Why?  For technologically sophisticated products, the consumer trusts experts with high levels of knowledge and expertise more so than fellow users.  As for luxury items, the explanation is quite different.  In those cases, consumers "want to set themselves apart."  Thus, they tend not to prefer something sourced from the crowd.  

Shorter Lines at Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts

Several weeks ago, The Street reported the following news regarding Starbucks: " Starbucks also seems to be having trouble dealing with the rapid rise and popularity of its mobile order and pay technology.  On a conference call with analysts, executives said there has been significant uptick in the usage of mobile order and pay. The jump created operational challenges, especially at its highest volume stores at peak traffic hours. The congestion at the beverage hand-off counter resulted in some customers who entered stores or considered visiting a location, but decided not to complete a transaction, the company said."  

Meanwhile, this week The Street reported that Dunkin' Donuts would be trimming its menu to improve wait times:  "We have thousands of combinations of drinks and sandwiches on our menu, in some cases more than McDonald's (MCD) and other competitors -- we have perhaps gotten too complex," acknowledged Dunkin' Brands Chairman and CEO Nigel Travis in an interview with TheStreet. Travis believes simplifying the menu will help speed up lines both in stores and via drive-thrus."  

The issues facing both Starbucks and Dunkin' are not unique.  As retail chains mature, they face formidable challenges regarding same-store sales increases.  How can they continue to increase comps year after year, even as their industry and their chain matures?   Many restaurants resort to "menu innovation" as a means of jumpstarting growth.   However, menu innovation inevitably means menu expansion at many restaurant chains.   Therefore, operations become substantially more complex.  Operating efficiencies diminish, and wait times increase.  Customer service begins to suffer.  The best chains prune their menus from time to time, so as to regain efficiencies and reduce wait times.  Of course, some customers will miss certain items that they have grown to love.  Chains need to be prepared for such complaints and train their staff members as to how to handle this pushback appropriately.   The chains that are most successful are ready and able to discuss the changes with customers, and they provide a consistent and effective response to customer questions across all locations.  

How Successful Leaders Make Decisions

Lydia Dishman has written a column for Fast Company titled, "How Leaders at Google, Buzzfeed, and More Make Decisions."   She has a number of interesting tidbits from various leaders.   A few key themes emerged:

The Value of Seeking Small Wins:

In a recent report for Fast Company, Harry McCracken asked staffers of Facebook how their leader has pulled off some of the company’s recent major achievements.  "I don’t hear a lot of anecdotes about him swooping in and personally making genius-level decisions that suddenly changed everything. Instead, they praise his inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to deploy resources, and devotion to improving Facebook and himself. He has a knack for carving up grand plans into small, doable victories."  

Ask Good Questions

Mark Parker, CEO of Nike: "You can’t always predict the winners. I end up asking a lot of questions, so the team thinks things through. I don’t say, ‘Do this, do that.’ I’m not a micromanager. I don’t believe in that. My father, when I was growing up, would say to me when I had to make a decision, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I think this.’ And he’d say, ‘That seems like a good idea.’ And over time, I started picking for myself. I didn’t need to go to him. At Nike, we have incredibly strong people. They know what to do."

Step Out of Your Functional Shoes:

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox:  We don’t want to compartmentalize people’s expertise based on their internal organization alone. We try to give individuals parity–-equality-–in the discussion. In our leadership team, I expect all of them to check at the door their function as the primary thought process by which they give me input. I expect them to think more about the customer, competitors, employees, and shareholders. So, I give everyone parity to speak about an issue.

Test Your Hypotheses: 

Dao Nguyen, Publisher of Buzzfeed:  Publishing volume is actually really important. It's not that we want to crank stuff out there for no reason at all. The more you publish, the more opportunities you have to look at things that are happening, read comments, have a new hypothesis, test a hypothesis. And if you can do that relatively quickly, then you remember what you were testing.