Built for Growth
Book

Built for Growth

Around the Corner or Across the Globe

Arthur Rubinfeld and Collins Hemingway
Wharton School Publishing, 2005
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Editorial Rating

8

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  • Applicable

Recommendation

This guidebook from Starbucks entrepreneur Arthur Rubinfeld, one of the world’s most successful retailers, provides an excellent introduction to conceptualizing, realizing, expanding and reinventing retail brands. Rubinfeld and co-author Collins Hemingway organize the book clearly around four basic principles: Think big; be oriented toward growth; find the right location, and plan for the future. They explain each principle step by step in terms that are understandable to the general management reader. They illustrate their assertions with examples from Rubinfeld’s experience and from the experiences of such prominent retailers as Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton and McDonald’s Ray Kroc. If you consider launching a new retail enterprise, getAbstract would advise reading this book first.

Summary

“The Hardest Easy Business”

Everybody wants to own a shop, but retail is a particularly tough business – entry is easy, but success is difficult. Low cash flow is the most common cause of failure, but an inadequate understanding of the many variables of branding, operations, expansion and other issues underlies this problem. Retail has gotten increasingly complex, with grand old names such as K-mart and Sears struggling to survive the competitive onslaught from e-commerce, big boxes, Wal-Mart and other attackers. To succeed, a retail entrepreneur first must have an idea, then create a concept and execute it. This framework, called “ideacreatexecute,” can help you address all your retail company’s angles and dimensions, from concept, design and planning through execution, expansion and innovation. Base this effort on four foundational ideas:

First Foundation: “Make No Little Plans”

Think big! Big thinkers are hopeful, optimistic, future-oriented and imaginative. They generate new concepts born of the values that give a company its reason for being. When retail brands fall apart, the reason is always either an absence of values or lack of a commitment to putting...

About the Authors

Arthur Rubinfeld was the executive vice president who built Starbucks from 100 outlets to more than 4000 stores, innovating with co-tenancy and co-branding relationships. Collins Hemingway, co-author with Bill Gates on Business@The Speed of Thought, was a director of business development and international marketing at Microsoft.

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