BIONIC RETAIL

A guide that looks at the dynamic nature of the current retail world.

In Hawkins’ view of the commercial retail world, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant shutdowns and supply chain issues, changes and innovations are happening at such an amplified rate that adaptation has become a crucial survival skill. “Not only do retailers have to try and keep track of a rapidly growing number of new innovative capabilities, but the time from the initial idea to creating, implementing, and scaling new capabilities is growing faster, giving retailers less and less time to discover, understand, test, and deploy new capabilities,” he writes. “In the post-inflection-point world, speed doesn’t kill—being slow does.” Lost sales, declining margins, defecting customers, business failures—all these things, he points out, are the costs of not confronting these changes. The author refers to retail as “complexity incarnate,” full of “millions of products, hundreds of thousands of stores, millions of workers, and supply chains stretching around the world,” and he invokes a number of illustration models (including chaos theory) to help readers understand how to navigate that intricate web. Hawkins employs an energetic prose to put forward what amounts to one idea: that retail is complex and requires nimble, innovative thinking. He has a weakness for business-world cliches (the tale of the unlucky frog who’s “put into a pot of lukewarm water” that’s “slowly brought to a boil,” or breaking out of comfort zones). In addition, some of the examples of success the author cites are odd, as when he refers to Elon Musk as “the world’s greatest entrepreneur” (between 2022 and 2023, Musk lost nearly $40 billion of his net worth due to voluntary errors). But retail managers and risk-takers will find some enthusiastic, clear, and useful thinking in these pages.

An upbeat and helpful but slightly familiar manifesto about the new realities of retail.