Compete or Create

Our retail tenant colleagues were under fire, again, in a recent CNBC Squawk Box interview for “blaming Amazon when they haven’t changed in 30 years.” The advice: “you have to do more than compete with the other guys, you have to create” (new experiences, partners, services, products.) It’s the adage, if you can’t win competing, create new rules. How do you hire those who create? According to Dennis Richelieu, Chief Executive, Sundial Brands, in a NYT interview, “You decide whether somebody is coming to build a business or to build a career. I believe you build a career by building a business.” To determine what matters most to a candidate he, like a lot of employers, weights the questions applicants ask higher than the answers to what the employer asks. Any successful sales person can tell you, when you create success for a client and build their business, there’s no competition.