Executive Director, Blue Spoon Consulting® / The Global Leader in Positioning Strategy at a System Level
None of it is working. The aisles of US drugstores are filled with locked cabinets full of toothpaste, shampoo and makeup. Patients wait in line for prescriptions at the rear of the store, where staffing is often thin and harried pharmacists rush through consultations while juggling phone calls. After decades of not changing their standard model, the two US drugstore giants are unrolling blueprints with the intention of #fixing America’s broken pharmacies. Walgreens and CVS Pharmacy "would love to return to such glory days as 2015, when Walgreens’ and CVS’ chains each had about 8,000 stores, employing tens of thousands of pharmacists. CVS’ pharmacy and consumer wellness operating margin was 9.9% that year, and Walgreens’ was 4.4% in the US. Since then, it’s another story. CVS’ pharmacy operating margin was 4.6% last year; Walgreens’ was -5%. For Walgreens, the issue is even more dire: Almost four-fifths of its sales last year came from its poorly performing US pharmacies. Investor displeasure has been evident, as shares have lost a third of their value this year alone and 77% over the past decade. CVS shares have lost 26% over the past 10 years." via Fiona Rutherford @ Bloomberg ********** Failure takes time. But the broader problem is deeper, wider and buried deep in the bedrock. It's a linear-hope-followed-by-expontental-scramble form of management born from a history of education that starts in kindergarten, long before a certificate of completion from the C-suite program at Harvard University is posted on LinkedIn. The thing that's not working is the thinking. Or more precisely, an entire system of thought baked and basted into a fragmentary worldview, now trying to break the hold of a massive feedback loop powered by cliche. You can't invent the automobile if you're trying to "fix" the horseless carriage. But if your vision is a return to the past....if the AI-enabled blueprint for growth is directed at trying to fix the thing that's not fixable....if the big ambition sits on the Standard Model....well, to quote Seinfeld: "Good luck with all that." #ModernStrategy @ Blue Spoon Consulting
Consumer Health-Tech & Innovation
6moJust say it. It’s all shit. And nothing good comes from shit. Unless you’re a potato. When everyone else goes left, the next gen of healthcare “blowshituppers” will go right. The tide is swinging. Some are waking up with the red pill. It’s not revenge. It’s a reckoning.