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Best Buy Appeals to Women

Julie Gilbert, who when at Best Buy helped the company sell to women

  • Julie Gilbert, a vice president and then senior VP at retailer Best Buy (2000-2009), recognised that the company was not capitalising on the increasing number of women consumers in the IT market. For Best Buy to do so, she realised it had to do more than come up with a smart marketing plan. “It would demand a change in the company’s orientation,” claim the authors of “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis”, an article in the Harvard Business Review (July-August 2009).
  • Gilbert believed that Best Buy needed to appeal to women “by reflecting the increasing integration of consumer electronics into family life”.
  • She helped the company to develop “in-store boutiques that sold home theater systems” by showcasing both the electronics and the entertainment environment. Sales staff were also trained to interact with the previously ignored female customers who came in with men.

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Heifetz, R, Grashow, A, and Linsky, M, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009

“The danger in the current economic situation is that people in positions of authority will hunker down. They will try to solve the problem with short-term fixes…People who practice what we call adaptive leadership do not make this mistake. Instead of hunkering down, they seize the opportunity of moments like the current one to hit the organization’s reset button. They use the turbulence of the present to build on and bring closure to the past. In the process, they change key rules of the game, reshape parts of the organization, and redefine the work people do.”