New Year's resolution - again

The pastor at our church yesterday asked who in the audience were going to make New Year's resolutions. A smattering of hands were raised, and then the pastor asked, "How many of you would make New Year's resolutions if you felt like they would do any good?" Nearly everyone else raised their hands.

The good thing for the produce industry is that most people will give New Year's resolutions a chance, despite the woeful track record of change in previous tries. Here is a link to a Web site claiming ownership of the concept;
From the Web site:

Gary Ryan Blair is the inspiration behind New Year's Resolution Week. This annual event was founded on the premise, that a single resolution can positively and profoundly create lasting change in your life and help to make the world a better place. To become part of the world's largest personal change initiative, visit www.GoalsGuy.com.:

Here is what Gary Ryan Blair says about the history of the NYR:

The tradition of the New Year's Resolutions goes all the way back to 153 B.C. Janus, a mythical king of early Rome was placed at the head of the calendar.
With two faces, Janus could look back on past events and forward to the future. Janus became the ancient symbol for resolutions and many Romans looked for forgiveness from their enemies and also exchanged gifts before the beginning of each year.
The New Year has not always begun on January 1, and it doesn't begin on that date everywhere today. It begins on that date only for cultures that use a 365-day solar calendar. January 1 became the beginning of the New Year in 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar developed a calendar that would more accurately reflect the seasons than previous calendars had.
The Romans named the first month of the year after Janus, the god of beginnings and the guardian of doors and entrances. He was always depicted with two faces, one on the front of his head and one on the back. Thus he could look backward and forward at the same time. At midnight on December 31, the Romans imagined Janus looking back at the old year and forward to the new. The Romans began a tradition of exchanging gifts on New Year's Eve by giving one another branches from sacred trees for good fortune. Later, nuts or coins imprinted with the god Janus became more common New Year's gifts.
In the Middle Ages, Christians changed New Year's Day to December 25, the birth of Jesus. Then they changed it to March 25, a holiday called the Annunciation. In the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII revised the Julian calendar, and the celebration of the New Year was returned to January 1.
The Julian and Gregorian calendars are solar calendars. Some cultures have lunar calendars, however. A year in a lunar calendar is less than 365 days because the months are based on the phases of the moon. The Chinese use a lunar calendar. Their new year begins at the time of the first full moon (over the Far East) after the sun enters Aquarius- sometime between January 19 and February 21.
Although the date for New Year's Day is not the same in every culture, it is always a time for celebration and for customs to ensure good luck in the coming year.

Here is a link to the Top Ten New Year's resolutions, as rated by the author:

1. Spend more time with family and friends
2. Fitness
3. Tame the bulge
4. Quit smoking
5. Enjoy life more
6. Quit drinking
7. Get out of debt
8, Learn something new
9. Help others
10. Get organized


TK: The industry's universally acceptable new year's resolution should be to "sell more produce" and Americans are likely to contribute to the effort - at least for the first couple weeks of January.

Learning from Whole Foods

Who shops at Whole Foods? We don't. Distance from our home (7 miles or so), lack of familiarity and perceived expense (whole paycheck) are factors that keep us very much outside the orbit of the retail phenomenon. On the other hand, I know of a couple who help account for why Whole Foods seems to have such a loyal following. My brother's in-laws, who live in North Sioux City, S.D. are committed Whole Foods customers, though the closest one to their residence is in Omaha, Neb. This week the couple visited Kansas City to rendezvous with my brother's family for a Christmas celebration. At the same time, they brought coolers so they could make a big stock up shopping trip to a KC Whole Foods before their return to North Sioux City. What makes them true blue customers of Whole Foods and devoted organic food aficionados?

Mary, my brother's mother in law, is a cancer survivor and is scrupulous about what she puts in her body. Randy, My brother's father in law is an endodontist, suggesting a level of disposable income that easily defeats resistance to higher prices.

How has Whole Foods captured the hearts and minds of customers like Mary and Randy? There is a book review in The New York Times on the Gary Hamel book "On the Future of Management" that profiles the Whole Foods business model. From the book review by William Holstein:

If companies now innovate by creating new products or new business models, he asks, why can’t they do the same in how they manage organizations? Might not a more modern approach to management be just the ticket to keep American companies ahead of their global competitors? This would entail moving from a century-old command-and-control model to a more latticed, networked style of organization.
If industrialization and world wars created one model of management hierarchy shared by business and the military, perhaps the next set of management ideas should be spawned by the Internet and the upheaval it has prompted in how humans think about information and community.
Mr. Hamel, who wrote this book with Bill Breen, critiques three companies that he argues may be harbingers of the future: Whole Foods Market, W. L. Gore & Associates (a privately held company that invented Gore-Tex, among other products) and Google.
Whole Foods has organized itself into roughly eight teams at individual stores, all of whom have the mission of improving the food that Americans eat. These teams, which have the right to hire and fire their own members, are given wide latitude about what to stock on the shelves and how to manage their stores as a whole.
But their performance numbers are open to all to behold, and their compensation is strongly linked to team, not individual, performance. “Unlike so many other companies, front-line employees at Whole Foods have both the freedom to do the right thing for customers, and the incentive to do the right thing for profits,” Mr. Hamel writes.
The fact that front-line employees are empowered to respond to the changing tastes of finicky shoppers is powerful. “In a more hierarchical company,” Mr. Hamel argues, “top management only sees problems once they’ve become pervasive and, therefore, expensive to fix.”

TK: More than a philosophy about food, Whole Foods also has ownership of a distinctive management approach that delivers a customer experience that is satisfying for Mary, Randy and millions more. Hamel suggests this management approach, at least, is transferable to other organizations.