Management Articles

• 10 Steps to Successful Marketing using Agile and Lean Practices
  "Every 2 weeks, we hold an Iteration Planning meeting. Each team member has her own sticky note color, creates stories on those notes and manages her own prioritized backlog using T-shirt sizing to roughly estimate each story. ... As we keep running our iterations and fulfilling our commitments, we are always looking for ways to improve them."

• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's
  "All of that can lead to a better customer experience. A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don't have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he'll walk you over instead of just saying 'aisle five.' Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try."

• Profit = Market Price - Actual Cost or Price = Cost + Desired Profit by John Hunter
  "Apple would probably sell very few iPhones for $2,000 more than they cost today. How many they would sell at $100 more or $100 less may change significantly but they would still be huge sellers at either of those prices. So that "market sets the price" idea is not 100% accurate (I don't think anyway). ... Pricing decisions also have big long term versus short term considerations. Apple has started pricing many things in a way which makes it hard for competitors to undercut them. Apple, almost for sure could charge more for the laptops they sell and the iPad and iPhone. But if they did they make it easier for a competitor to compete on price. This pricing decision is an Apple decision not a market decision."

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop
  "Flowers, as everyone knows, are among the freshest, most perishable objects on earth. Which is why fresh flowers are placed right up front--to "prime" us to think of freshness the moment we enter the store. Consider the opposite--what if we entered the store and were greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers?"