Authors: Michael Dart & Robin Lewis

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Comments: After their provocative The New Rules of Retail two years ago, Michael Dart and Robin Lewis strike again with Retail’s Seismic Shift, a look at the next big changes in retail and the fundamental reasons why “many companies will fail during the next few years”. The growing imbalance between supply and demand is the main culprit and the gap between the two will continue to grow because of a series of dramatic trends: the authors list dematerialisation; demography; the fragmentation of the market; and technology as some of these trends. In technology, APIs (noted in the January 2018 CIO meeting), blockchain, mobile computing power, and of course AI are discussed. But this is not a treatise about technology. It describes a deep change, in particular away from the benefits of economies of scale which underlie so much of the taken-for-granted thinking in business today. Dart and Lewis recommend constructing a brand for the future through clear values, by raising the customer’s self-esteem, through innovation, maintaining relative scarcity, and a consistent identity. The new retail requires a different frame of mind which includes the agility and flexibility of a “liquefied organisation”, and the advantages of a “platform model”.