All companies are different; all companies are the same. It is interesting to me to think about why Radiant is more like The Coca Cola Company than some of our competitors. Coke sells most everything they’ve got through a distribution channel. Their people on the front line are trusted advisors to the Coke bottlers, helping them build plans, increase customer satisfaction, grow sales while managing carefully their costs, bring new products to market, and make more money. Coke focuses on new product development, new market development, branding and lead generation. Some of our competitors decided many years ago that they preferred to have ownership over their distribution channels, instead of nurturing independent partners. We believe the entrepreneurial spirit dwarfs the importance of control. We all know the results – our biggest competitor had a 3-1 sales advantage over Radiant in the United States restaurant industry ten years ago and now Radiant outsells them.

I see so many examples in our company where people try to explain how different we are from other technology companies. When discussing, for example, why we can’t expand our CounterPoint eCommerce business as rapidly as Amazon, the internal tendency is to explain why we’re so different. And we are. But I find it interesting to see where we’re similar to major success stories and see what we can learn from those. I have learned a lot from watching the Coke model, the Amazon model (Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letter is one of my favorite annual reads), and many others. Why can’t we launch new product lines as cleanly as P&G? Why can’t we integrate new companies as efficiently as Cisco? Why can’t we build a China business like KFC did? Why can’t we turn on our systems as easily as TVs (uhmm, TV’s from the late 20^th century, not today’s variety)? There is a world to learn from both past and present if we discover the formulas of existing success stories instead of needing to invent new ones.

Tags: Amazon, Coca Cola Company, Coke, CounterPoint, eCommerce, Executive, Jeff Bezos

This entry was posted by Andy Heyman, Chief Operating Officer on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 8:08 am and is filed under Executive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.