Each year I go back into my WWII geek out phase and dive into Stephen Ambrose and many other authors. The quote I found intriguing from General Eisenhower regarding the D-Day invasion of Normandy is “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Of course the Allies were planning for years for this great invasion but they knew planning could only go so far, it was the intense individual training that ultimately led the Allied forces to victory.
The training proved its legitimacy every moment of that day when almost every plan went kaput and the individual training had to keep soldiers moving forward despite incredible odds. Plans are very important, but it’s how we react in the field of battle that will ultimately determine our success or failure.
Please use this very important lesson in your retail stores and understand that, yes you do need to indeed plan your year, your staffing, promotions, advertising and inventory flow, but more importantly you need to keep your troops sharp so they know how to sell that difficult customer, they know how to react to an out of stock item, they know how to cover your sale floor when there’s a lull right before the storm. If it’s one thing we see here at Train Retail is that stores too often rely on natural human instinct and fail to train their teams what to do in so many situations. The sad result is that the owner or manager now needs to come in and save the customer relationship or just take their eye off the management ball.
In the movie, Amedaeus, Salieri sees himself so much as a mediocrity that calls himself the “patron saint of mediocrity.” He blesses the others because they are mediocrities too. At the very end we hear Mozart’s laugh as if he was laughing at him being rolled down the hallway of the asylum yelling, “Mediocrity is everywhere!” Let’s make plans, but plans are futile if we don’t train. If we don’t train, we accept mediocrity at best.