When I was growing up, my Mom used to say that, when presented with an opportunity, the question never was if to take advantage of it, but rather how to seize it.  I am someone fortunate enough to have had access in my life to many opportunities.  Most opportunities have come with a cost, and my family was one of limited financial resources.  So the “how” most often was how to pay the price of admission.  Never was that challenge greater than when I prepared to go to college.  My answer to the price of admission question turned out to be helpful to me in many ways and since has paid dividends beyond just helping me to the pay my college tuition.  My answer was that I got a job at Radio Shack.

During my three and one-half Radio Shack years, I worked at a number of different stores in some very different venues.  These included urban, suburban and rural, with customer groups to match.  Even more profound was the variety of managers (regional, district, and store) and teammates with whom I worked.  The lessons I learned ran the gamut from sales, merchandising, managing up, teamwork, customer service, profit and loss statements, shrinkage (and not the kind made famous on Seinfeld)… you name it, they have it all at the “Shack.”

What I learned in my unglamorous sales and (sometimes) management role were the fundamental truths of business that are present in most every organization, regardless of the veneers of corporate brand, position title, and any number of other factors that may mask these inescapable realities of the work place.  Ironically, the more I furthered my professional and academic experiences, and the higher I rose in organizations, the more I found myself drawing on the Radio Shack lessons from years before.  The more I applied those lessons and built on them, the more successful I became at helping myself, others and the organizations with which I worked.  In fact, what I came to realize and to trust was that everything I had learned along the way had value.  Moreover, my ability to capture, relate, and apply seemingly esoteric business concepts and strategies effectively, through straightforward example and illustration, made me highly effective as an organization contributor and advisor.

After years of using these homespun homilies to help myself, to help others, and to help the organizations that we served and led, I am ready to share with you – with a smile on my lips and a twinkle in my eye – some of the building blocks that define my guiding maxim: Everything you need to build a business, you can find at Radio Shack.

“Where Is, As Is”

In my days at Radio Shack, there was a program for jettisoning merchandise from a store’s inventory (display items, items that may be slightly damaged, etc.) that were no longer serving any purpose other than to be a drag on store profitability.  In exchange for paying a dramatically reduced price for an item, buyers were put on notice that these items were available “where is, as is” – if you can find the item, you can buy it in whatever condition you find it…all sales are final.  The Radio Shack goal was to get rid of the item as fast and as completely as possible.  While there is no consumer market for cast-off strategies, the need for organizations to purge their inventory of approaches to the past to clear the way for focusing on the future is just as real, and far more urgent.

Business leaders and consultants love to talk about strategy, strategic direction, and strategic imperatives, and spend inordinate sums of money cooking up and serving up newer and grander variations on the theme.  There is a corollary belief in business, and in life, that starting with a clean slate – or if you prefer, turning the page, turning over a new leaf, etc. – is the best way to improve.  In other words, out with the old and in with the new.  As desirable as that exorcism may seem, it is more often the case that we attempt to improve by incrementally adjusting our current circumstance.  This especially is true in business where our freedom to make a break from the past is constrained by colleagues, infrastructure, competition, and most of all, inertia.  Instead of looking at their opportunities and creating approaches that enable their organization to fully leverage them, decision-makers confine themselves to adjusting their past and present approaches, in order to confront their current level of success and grow beyond it.

Not so long ago, references to a “flat world” still evoked memories of Christopher Columbus and not Thomas Friedman’s vivid illustration of our current hyper-competitive global business landscape.  Back then, Professor, consultant and author Gary Hamel addressed the issue this way in his book, Leading the Revolution:

“[T]he most fearsome threat to continued success is not inefficiency but irrelevancy.  Any company that is not an industry revolutionary is already on the road to insignificance.

"Industry revolution is the product of strategy innovation.  In an increasingly non-linear world, only non-linear strategies will create new wealth.  As companies move beyond the incremental, strategy innovation—the capacity to reconceive product and service concepts, redraw market boundaries, and radically alter deep-down industry economics—will become the next critical competitive advantage.  Strategy innovation is the only way for a company to renew its lease on success.”¹

Despite his counsel, Hamel agrees though that most companies are not set up to do anything more than fiddle around the margins because they start with their existing approach and revise and extend that approach. In his words:

“[Organizations] know how to get better, but they don't know how to get different.  In a world where incumbency is worth next to nothing, a company must be capable of reinventing its deepest sense of self and its core business concept not once a decade, in the midst of a crisis, when it trades out one CEO for another, but continuously, year after year.”²

For all the talk of innovation, radical and otherwise, there is precious little constructive guidance on how best to continuously transform organizations. Yet the answer literally is right under our noses: it’s in the people who do the work that drives our organizations’ successes – the “where is” is their knowledge, and the “as is” is in how they apply what they know. Where is, as is can be an enriching and sustainable approach to the continuous learning and transformation needed to compete in a flat world. Here are some basic steps:

1. Make your strategic imperatives widely known and understood within your organization – especially in terms of what each person can do to contribute to the fulfillment of these imperatives
2. Ask your people what they know that is important to their contribution towards your collective strategic goal achievement
3. Ask your people how they apply their knowledge in a way that adds value to this effort (what is their “secret sauce” recipe) – and assign a quantitative measure to that value
4. Determine which areas of applied knowledge are even more valuable if the “secret sauce” recipe is shared with others
5. Develop a mechanism for sharing this knowledge to enable more people to perform critical work at a high level.

How much of your intellectual capital inventory is hiding in some far corner of your organization, gathering dust?  By taking the above steps, you may be surprised to find that, like at Radio Shack, there is always somebody who can make better use of that asset, where is, as is.

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¹Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution, Harvard Business School Press, 2000.

²ibid.

P.S. In future nuggets, we will examine how the application of knowledge assets can and should occur to create better organization performance, and more sustainable success.  And yes, each will be guided by tried and proven Radio Shack maxims.  Golden nuggets of wisdom, such as:

• “I’m just a small vendor trying to make a buck”
• Clip-On Ties
• 85% Name and Address Capture
• “If I don’t see you cleaning the cases, they aren’t clean”
• User Malfunction/POS Line
• “Y’all got Lay-away?”
• Good, Better, Best
• “Here’s your free ‘Battery Club’ card”

Radio Shack® is a registered trade mark of Radio Shack Corporation.