Nights in Nottingham

So here I am in Nottingham, halfway through a couple of days working on the Large Retailer’s project - the first time I’ve been onsite for more than a couple of hours at a time, and the first opportunity to try and get to grips with what it is I’m supposed to be looking at. First impressions were somewhat mixed - the physical environment was pure California,all break-out zones and a Starbucks in the atrium; while the culture and the processes give every impression of having been distilled from a combination of the Civil Service and Marks and Spencers circa-1997. It’s a pretty strange mixture for a retailer - very top-down, very complex and surprisingly non customer-centric.

Which could make the project very difficult, or alternatively very interesting. Getting access to the information that I’m after could prove to be tricky, if only because finding the right person in the right functional silo doesn’t look like it will be straight-forward. But the flip side to that is the scope could be much more rewarding, because the areas that I’m supposed to looking at don’t seem to have been looked at before. The bottom line is that I feel happier about the scope of what the project is going to involve - for the first time for a while there seems to be some structure to things.

Filed under MBA |