Walmart: An Industrial Age Masterpiece Until Amazon Came Along

Each month, Charles Araujo joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment known as “Araujo on Transformation.” Charlie is a bestselling author who has three books to his name: “The Quantum Age of IT,” “The Ecosystem Advantage,” and “Performance-driven IT.” He is also an engaging speaker who will entertain and challenge your audience. Charlie has a website called www.charlesaraujo.com, and another called “The Institute for Digital Transformation.”

Charlie says at his core, he’s an IT guy who ran technical operations for a billion-dollar healthcare firm – and then spent his career as a consultant for executives who were engaged in large-scale transformational programs – things like organizational design, operational optimization, and process improvement.

He says throughout the Industrial Age, it was all about producing a mass product for a mass market. The industrial barons of their time didn’t have robots – they had human beings. But they were basically robots. They trained us to show up on time, every day, and repeatedly do the same thing over, and over again.

Charlie says he launched a new digital journal called “Your Digital Future,” and it’s specifically aimed at answering the question of how do digital leaders step into this bold future. And he wrote a piece about why automation fails – and it has to do with the fact that we had to create space in the organizations for them to have a safe path.

Charlie says we all have more information available to us than ever before. He says the idea of secrecy in an organization is almost a joke today – so how do we as a company start transforming our entire business model and our operating model around it?

Charlie says he uses Amazon and Walmart as an example. Walmart was the Industrial Age masterpiece. They built the world’s most amazing supply chain and they should have been unassailable, but what Amazon has brought to the table is the transformation of the customer experience.

He said he had ordered six chairs from West Elm, and they said it would take four months to arrive. When they showed up the two chairs were in the wrong color. And the second time one of those chairs was also in the wrong color. Fast forward to his wife, and she ordered a very extensive flower set from a name-brand florist. The flowers came, and they were very lackluster, but on the spot the agent gave his wife a credit for the entire amount.

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