Andrew Nadin

How do you grow a business? If you asked that question in an MBA college class, you’d get a varied set of answers, but themes would emerge: have a strategy, control costs, know your customer, a unique product/service, execute the plan. None of these answers are wrong, but MBA students’ answers miss the point: the real world is imperfect with neither the time, resources nor budgets to tackle the issue of growth from an academic standpoint. Shareholders want value…now. Customers want the product/service…now. Employees want to be taken care of…now. In established businesses, a growth strategy generally involves changing an existing course of action. What exists may be well known and preferred, and change is generally seen as something which is painful, risky and undesirable.

Which explains why many businesses eke out incremental growth year after year. So, let’s address some of the macro questions associated with growth and strategy.

According to the Harvard Business Review, they are. 

So, is it true? And if so, what should we (the AI industry) and we (marketers) do about it? Luckily, HBR lives up to its reputation, offering practical advice as well as insight. And living up to our reputation for being helpful, DecaSIM decided to summarize the HBR article for you (below).

(And, yes, we used ChatGPT to create the summary. In case you’re wondering, it took about 25 seconds to write the prompt, copy the URL and copy/paste the summary into Word. It’s taken longer to write this intro.)

First of all, if you’re in the financial, distribution, restaurant/hospitality, transportation, consulting, energy or consumer industries there’s a higher-than-average chance your CEO is new. So that covers nearly all of us. In fact, those industries are responsible for 73% of all CEO turnover in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies (674 in total) through August 2023.

In case you missed it, USPS has published its proposed rate increases starting January 21st 2024. It’s doubtful many people are bothered by this personally, no one uses snail mail anymore, only junk mail, utility bills and weekly ads arrive in our mailboxes.

But if you’re still sending thousands of letters or ad fliers you most certainly are bothered by it. The drive to go ‘paperless’ is reaching fever pitch with everyone from credit cards and loyalty programs screaming at us to ‘save the planet’, a.k.a. save me the price of the stamp and keep my business costs down. Like the hotels telling us to ‘save the planet’, a.k.a. save me the price of washing towels and keep my business costs down.

Indeed, this is the DecaSIM blog.

Our purpose is to describe how we are going to revolutionize the world of merchandising planning using AI tools.