Summary of The Good Jobs Strategy

Zeynep Ton

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Rating

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Recommendation

Investing in your retail company’s employees makes good business sense, writes MIT professor Zeynep Ton. She offers a fresh perspective by showing how this investment in your staff pays off even more in tandem with four facets of “operational excellence.” Using real-life examples from four outstanding companies, including Costco and Trader Joe’s, she shows how good wages, cross-training, overstaffing and limited product assortments can help retailers energize and motivate their employees. She also recounts some notable retail stumbles as cautionary tales. getAbstract recommends her solid advice and practical wisdom to retail decision makers, executives and store managers seeking to build an engaged workforce.

In this summary, you will learn

How retailers can pay good wages and earn sound profits,
Why investing in people and in operations go hand in hand, and
How the best retailers achieve operational excellence in four steps.

About the Author

Zeynep Ton, a former faculty member at the Harvard Business School, teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and The New Yorker.

Summary

Cutting Labor Costs Backfires
Salespeople and cashiers hold the two most common jobs in the United States – yet they earn far below the median wage for US workers. The salary of a typical full-time retail sales worker falls below the poverty line for a family of four. Part-timers have...