In retail especially, Takeaway # 4 is where everything stems from, in many cases. “Kicking the tyres” first is often a life-saver in these circumstances. What’s on the drawing board often is far different from what happens at point of execution.

For instance, I was part of a team that went to take a look at how UK’s retail “big boys” ( Argos, Tesco, Asda etc ) make preps for Christmas. Came back with “very good ideas”. Implementing them, they went up in smoke. A simple but key mis-step: Christmas in the northern hemisphere occurs in winter, in the southern hemisphere it’s in summer! While we were remotely mindful of this fact, the actual reality on the ground was quite astounding.

Fortunately enough we went into it piecemeal.