| Issue 81 |

Simone Bellavita, CEO, Lordan

• Lordan's website: www.lordan-coils.com
• Would you like to be interviewed?: contact us
  

I Seek You! Inside Yossi Vardi’s Head / Anthony David / Books in the Attic

It’s summer, we’re in the midst of the London Olympics, the competitions are getting better every day, and it’s harder than ever to find time to read, especially non-fiction books. So this time we’re recommending a lighter read, written in journalistic style.

This book was written by biographer Anthony David, who came to Israel to discover the secret to Israeli high-tech success, and he stayed to try and uncover the secret of Yossi Vardi’s charm.

Even though Yossi Vardi doesn’t take himself, or the book that was written about him seriously, the book offers some real insights.

First – The book offers a peek behind the scenes of Mirabilis’s beginnings, the company that developed ICQ, the instant messaging application, and the negotiations that Vardi conducted with AOL, culminating in Mirabilis being sold for 407 million dollars, and the birth of the start-up frenzy in Israel.

Second – The book outlines the systematic search of Yossi Vardi, dubbed as the world’s “Internet guru”, for the glue that holds the Web 2.0, social networks and social media together. Or, in Yossi’s words – looking for the “creative edge”: what makes specific internet applications “cool”, contagious, and capable of sweeping away thousands of fans and leading to millions of downloads.

And finally, we also learn about Yossi himself and how he uses humor and humanity together with assiduity and in-depth learning to locate and connect young entrepreneurs (which he says are “much more talented than me”) while helping them leverage enterprises in which he chooses to invest, and… enjoying every minute.

If Internet enterprises interest you, or if viral marketing through the social networks is one of your requirements, this book is a good starting point. You don’t need to read it from cover to cover, and like Yossi Vardi, you don’t have to take the book seriously. Enjoy reading it, internalize some insights, and go back to the TV screen. After all, these are Olympic days.

Things That Sell Themselves
About the invention of self-service

Clarence Saunders is allegedly one of the most influential inventors in the world, even though he is not a household name. In 1916, when Clarence was 35 years old, after a 20-year career in retail sales, he opened up an innovative grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee. Here, for the first time ever, customers served themselves instead of the grocer bringing them the products they wanted. Clarence developed the concept of self-service as part of his obsession with streamlining grocery stores and saving on manpower costs.

 In the new shop, called Piggly Wiggly, customers entered through a turnstile, got a shopping basket, passed through the aisles that sold 605 products in the various departments, and paid for their groceries at the checkouts near the store exit. All these (turnstile, shopping baskets, display aisles, departments, and checkouts) were part of the innovative concept that Clarence developed, and which he also registered as a patent in 1917.

Clarence leveraged his patent and issued franchises to open additional Piggly Wiggly branches and more chains that operated under the same concept. In 1932, the Piggly Wiggly chain had 2,660 branches with annual revenues of $180 million. Customers paid in cash, which was consistent with Clarence’s worldview, which believed that the traditional grocery shops weren’t profitable enough.  

The Piggly Wiggly branch exhibited many more retail innovations, including a price tag that was attached to every product in the shop, shopping carts, ice boxes, employee uniforms (for hygiene purposes), an unvarying location for products at all the chain’s shops (so that shoppers always knew where to find what they were looking for), state of the art displays, and issuing franchises for the self-service method. The invention of self-service passed the power of choice to the customers, and thus nationalized the branding and packaging of consumer goods throughout the United States.  

The modern supermarket is the result of Clarence Saunder’s invention, and numerous other industries developed subsequent to the invention of self-service: self-service at gas stations, bank ATMs, self-serve and buffet restaurants, automatic ticketing for flights, vending machines, online shopping sites, and more. Executives at Toyota were inspired by the Piggly Wiggly chain’s Just-in-time inventory strategy, and adopted it as Toyota’s dominant manufacturing and operations philosophy. Clarence Saunders went bankrupt several times throughout his life, and each time he made a comeback and founded another chain of increasingly “automatic” supermarkets. We are enjoying the fruits of his invention to this very day. And in this context, it is perhaps worth noting as a concluding remark that studies show that customers’ level of satisfaction actually increases when they serve themselves.

• Systematic Innovation workshops
• Information about an Excellence in Customer Service workshop can be found here(page 25 in a PDF booklet, in Hebrew).