The wonder of Wellies

Will Wellworths be the new Microsoft or Virgin? For those of you that haven't read the story , an innovative and adventorous ex Woolworths store manager has raised enough money through consortium funding to reopen the Woolies store in Dorset as Wellworths. This is a great story, Claire Robertson (remember that name as she could soon be mentioned in the same breath as Gates and Branson) worked her way up from Saturday girl to store manager and is now employing 22 former employees in the new venture.

I bet when Woolworths were considering their future and wasting a fortune on expensive turnaround consultants they didn't give Claire a 2nd, 3rd or even a milliointh thought! What a shame, I would have put money on her having anwers for many of the chains problems.

The real shame is that thousands of businesses are in the same boat, the financial crisis is hurting their business and the traditional response is to reduce cost and get rid of people. When it comes to removing people from a business there is no real logic to it. Managers, apparently, make their decisions based on "legitimate" business criteria? The reality is far from the truth the decision is most likely made on salary, service function etc, the really scary factor and the one no one will admit is that many decisions are made on feeling! Like it or not these decisions are made by people not machines and peoples decision making process will be influenced by feeling.

The danger of the traditional approach to downsizing is that is takes no account of either the value of each individual in terms of their human capital value (how much they have cost to develop and how much they contribute) or their "real" and often unseen influence in the organisation or how innovative they are. There are some fantastic tools out there that can do all three. The real tragedy is that if these tools were used for performance improvement as opposed to survival there would be no need to down size in the first place.