Walmart: An Industrial Age Masterpiece Until Amazon Came Along

Each month, Charles Araujo joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring
segment known as “Araujo on Transformation.” Charlie is a
bestselling author who has three books to his name: “The Quantum
Age of IT,” “The Ecosystem Advantage,” and “Performance-driven
IT.” He is also an engaging speaker who will entertain and
challenge your audience. Charlie has a website called
www.charlesaraujo.com, and another called “The Institute for
Digital Transformation.”





Charlie says at his core, he’s an IT guy who ran technical
operations for a billion-dollar healthcare firm – and then spent
his career as a consultant for executives who were engaged in
large-scale transformational programs – things like
organizational design, operational optimization, and process
improvement.


He says throughout the Industrial Age, it was all about producing
a mass product for a mass market. The industrial barons of their
time didn’t have robots – they had human beings. But they were
basically robots. They trained us to show up on time, every day,
and repeatedly do the same thing over, and over again.


Charlie says he launched a new digital journal called “Your
Digital Future,” and it’s specifically aimed at answering the
question of how do digital leaders step into this bold future.
And he wrote a piece about why automation fails – and it has to
do with the fact that we had to create space in the organizations
for them to have a safe path.


Charlie says we all have more information available to us than
ever before. He says the idea of secrecy in an organization is
almost a joke today – so how do we as a company start
transforming our entire business model and our operating model
around it?


Charlie says he uses Amazon and Walmart as an example. Walmart
was the Industrial Age masterpiece. They built the world’s most
amazing supply chain and they should have been unassailable, but
what Amazon has brought to the table is the transformation of the
customer experience.


He said he had ordered six chairs from West Elm, and they said it
would take four months to arrive. When they showed up the two
chairs were in the wrong color. And the second time one of those
chairs was also in the wrong color. Fast forward to his wife, and
she ordered a very extensive flower set from a name-brand
florist. The flowers came, and they were very lackluster, but on
the spot the agent gave his wife a credit for the entire amount.





See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.


Visit Cloud Wars for more.