Not gonna lie, the website of a remarkably ordinary frozen food supermarket found on most UK high streets is not where I'd expect to find this kind of content :)
I wish I new of more gems like this. Company sites that go into detail where they went wrong and how they turned things around make for both amazing reading and great educational material.
Private firms are entertainingly idiosyncratic in ways only founder-powered public firms barely approach. The other big one I find entertaining is Dr Bronner’s soap which has a massive label full of dense text that is totally stream of consciousness sentences. Amazing.
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.
I smirk and laugh this little slideshow and then remember that my own work involves internal tools to promote governance and productivity while formalizing requirements to two outsourced developers.
I don't think I'm one of the red team's 7 captains, but I don't exactly have my hands on the paddle every single day. After all, I can find the time to lollygag on HN between 9-5.
I think generalizations are usually bad. I genuinely am weirded out by management's fascination with consultants. It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones, at least the big ones. Also, there are management which feel like companies always need change, but really you have to examine the competitve position within the broader industry not just a vacumm. Things honestly stay the same for a long time. IBM had more revenue then Microsoft all the way up to the early 2010s. Switching costs are powerful - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...
I think a key takeaway is the human nature to constantly act, and not just sit and do nothing. Lot's of value in sitting around, especially in investing.
My interpretation of the parable is really just that management consultants are paid to tell you what you already know and give you the conclusions you want to hear - hence why their "solution" is non-specific and the retrospective analysis vindicates what upper management already wanted.
It's also a criticism of management-heavy offices who have lost touch with reality, but consultants are a byword for such things, so I guess the title is succinct at the cost of accuracy.
Score-settling by the ousted (and then returning) CEO Malcolm Walker. After Iceland merged with Booker in 2000, Walker was pushed out and a new management team led by Bill Grimsey took over. Sales declined, head office staff ballooned and they hired a lot of McKinsey types. Walker's point is that they'd overcomplicated what was basically quite a simple business.
Thats a good point of view of the traditional Managment consultants, now for the "AI era", this type of interventions will not exist
Maybe now the Big coorp will finally get closer to real life solutions to the problems companies face
My company is "AI native" in the sense that even though we are not a tech company we are using it heavily to build a bunch of tech that makes us more efficient.
Think building better SaaS products around our actual process rather than whatever bespoke niche SaaS product provides. this has yielded real savings in both software costs and efficiency. Compared to our peers, we are light years ahead. Even the supposed "leading AI readiness consultants" hired by the group board agreed.
our board have still hired kpmg[1] or some other vague merchant to come and help us deliver "efficiencies"
[1] its not them, but I want to keep some level of mystique about where I work
Nope. Everyone has their strengths and should avoid some types of work. AI doesn't change this.
Many consultants and entrepreneurs are too shameless to do that. AI only amplifies their dysfunction.
What most businesses are doing instead is squeezing their middle management to do more with less. No consultants. AI is cheaper. This squeeze happens every time the economy stagnates, and adding AI as "help" is irrelevant.
https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-performance/
Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.
I don't think I'm one of the red team's 7 captains, but I don't exactly have my hands on the paddle every single day. After all, I can find the time to lollygag on HN between 9-5.
I think a key takeaway is the human nature to constantly act, and not just sit and do nothing. Lot's of value in sitting around, especially in investing.
This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.
It's also a criticism of management-heavy offices who have lost touch with reality, but consultants are a byword for such things, so I guess the title is succinct at the cost of accuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland_v_Iceland_Foods_Ltd
Well that's cursed
and thought it was interesting enough to submit on its own
My company is "AI native" in the sense that even though we are not a tech company we are using it heavily to build a bunch of tech that makes us more efficient.
Think building better SaaS products around our actual process rather than whatever bespoke niche SaaS product provides. this has yielded real savings in both software costs and efficiency. Compared to our peers, we are light years ahead. Even the supposed "leading AI readiness consultants" hired by the group board agreed.
our board have still hired kpmg[1] or some other vague merchant to come and help us deliver "efficiencies"
[1] its not them, but I want to keep some level of mystique about where I work
Many consultants and entrepreneurs are too shameless to do that. AI only amplifies their dysfunction.
What most businesses are doing instead is squeezing their middle management to do more with less. No consultants. AI is cheaper. This squeeze happens every time the economy stagnates, and adding AI as "help" is irrelevant.