Craig Menear recently sat down with The Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson, Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent, BuzzFeed Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti, and BuzzFeed President Greg Coleman to share thoughts on innovation, leadership and more.
If it sounds like a conversation you’d like some notes from, don’t worry… we did the writing for you.
Their chat was held at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business in front of students and business leaders. Three key themes emerged:
1. Innovation and disruption go hand-in-hand
Craig Menear: “Retail has changed more in the last 3 years than it has in the last 30 years, and that pace of change will continue to accelerate. We have to be prepared for potential disruptors to our business to make sure we are investing in the right places to serve customers. Our leadership team did a ‘war games’ exercise recently with teams pretending to be different companies and technologies. We aggressively designed strategies to go after our own business, and the results were eye-opening and caused us to make some essential changes and investments. It really lit a fire under our value of creating an entrepreneurial spirit throughout our company.”
2. Follow where the consumer is going
Jonah Peretti: “Buzzfeed achieves 7 billion views each month with a simple strategy: Create a content community that centers on what people want to share and express. You have to serve the whole human,” he said, describing Buzzfeed’s signature mix of news, millennial humor, and new forays into video and TV.”
Muhtar Kent: “You have to follow the consumer passionately. Innovation starts and ends with the consumer. We think of innovation in terms of marketing, we think about it in terms of products, we think about it in terms of packaging, in terms of equipment, and in terms of processes. It’s about having the courage to create an ecosystem around you, particularly with Millennials and young people, so you feel confident enough to take risks.”
3. Invest in the business
Craig Menear: “With the pace of change today in customer expectations, you can’t have a shortsighted focus on quarterly earnings only. We’re lucky that our Board of Directors is fully supportive of our interconnected retail strategy to knit together our stores and our online presence to seamlessly serve customers. If you don’t build and push where the customer is going, you’ll have a pretty short mission.”
Click here to learn more about The Home Depot’s interconnected retail strategy or here to get an inside look at our Innovation Center at Georgia Tech.
