Exercise: Applying Putting “People First” to Your Retail Business

Graph your organization as a circular model rather than a hierarchical pyramid. It doesn’t matter where you personally are in the organization. Similarly, you could do this for a business (such as a design studio or a gas station), a university faculty department, or even your own extended family. It’s not that easy to do, and there may not be a precisely correct way to do it, but this exercise can be a helpful way to re-imagine an organizational community and the relationships that comprise it.

Hint: For a traditional retail organization, the center of the circle could be the customer. For the first ring, each box could represent an individual store that interacts directly with the customer. The outer ring would represent the company’s divisions that support the stores (i.e., finance, IT, HR, logistics, etc.).

This exercise is excerpted from the book The Five Laws of Retail.