In a scene in the movie, Central Intelligence, Kevin Hart’s character is reconnecting with a high school classmate, “Fat Robby,” played by Dwayne Johnson.
Hart asks how he got in such great shape. Robby responds:
I didn’t do much really. All right.
I just did one thing.
I worked out 6 hours a day, every day, for the last 20 years. Anybody could do it, right?
That reminded of something I see in the telling of a lot of success, and failure, stories.
People try to boil it down to just one thing.
But, the real story is more like what Johnson says after that. It really wasn’t just one thing.
Hart’s face is the typical response you get when you try to explain it’s really more than just one thing.
Walmart’s success is a good example.
The first thing people think about Walmart is low prices.
Many people think that’s the ‘just one thing’ for Walmart.
They missed that Walmart invested heavily in its supply chain management, long before other retailers. They did this to help save costs and keep prices low, but it also had an unexpected benefit. It meant that stores were stocked and shoppers more often found what they wanted.
Even the second generation Walmart management lost sight of this, and other, important value dimensions as they focused on the ‘just one thing’ of low price in the 90s and 00s.
They kept costs low by doing things like servicing shelves less and cutting cashier labor to the bone.
This led to messy, disorganized stores and long lines at the checkout.
Walmart may have what you want on the shelf, but they made it less appealing and less convenient to get it.
For a lot of customers, cleaner, more organized stores with shorter checkout lines became more appealing, even if the prices weren’t rock bottom.
Losing customers to competition made Walmart management realize they had neglected the importance of these other value dimensions. So, they put more effort into keeping stores clean and organized and making it easier to check out.
Business improved.
It’s good to remember that success and failures usually come down to more than just one thing.
Many times those other contributors are not obvious.
Our Dinner Table 