Robert Iger’s Excelsior Moment: A Short Book Review

There are certain things that you can’t learn by simply reading about them – kindness, empathy, listening, trusting your gut, etc. And it is these very things that self-help books and autobiographies of business leaders espouse. People often pick up these books expecting ah-ha wisdom, but it boils down to completely banal and cliched life-lessons that we’re all aware of. These lessons are a rite of passage and can’t possibly be understood or acquired by reading about them. There’s also the fact that individual journeys are more about luck and circumstance than anything else, and thus, force-fitting a bunch of generic leadership traits into a story about a leader’s rise to the top is in no way representative of how most of these journeys progress.

The Amazons of Retail

One of the dominant trends that we’ve been talking about and seeing for a while in the retail domain is the end of pure-play single-channel retail. Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is a giant step in that direction and a validation of the fact that omni-channel retail is the future. While many industry watchers were caught unaware, Amazon has been toying with the idea of brick-and-mortar retail for a while now. Its efforts in this space can be traced back to the launch of its Amazon Books stores and more recently, its futuristic checkout-counter free concept called Go.