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It's all about the spirit

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
278 Seiten
Englisch
edition aerschienen am01.12.2023
Gerhard Drexel, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Spar Austria, tells the story of how the company became the number 1 Austrian food retailer after years of catching up to the competition. In doing so, he designs a modern counter-model to the spirit-free, technocratic-sterile leadership style. He shows how, with the right spirit, employees can be motivated on the path to market leadership. In Drexel's model, companies are there for the people again instead of the other way around, and that's exactly what makes them successful.

Gerhard Drexel studied business administration at the universities of St. Gallen and Innsbruck. After years as a consultant at the Malik Management Center St. Gallen, he moved to the board of Spar Austria in 1990. As a long-standing CEO, in 2020 he succeeded in making the company the market leader in the Austrian food trade with spirit and humanity. Gerhard Drexel has been Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Spar Austria since 2021.mehr

Produkt

KlappentextGerhard Drexel, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Spar Austria, tells the story of how the company became the number 1 Austrian food retailer after years of catching up to the competition. In doing so, he designs a modern counter-model to the spirit-free, technocratic-sterile leadership style. He shows how, with the right spirit, employees can be motivated on the path to market leadership. In Drexel's model, companies are there for the people again instead of the other way around, and that's exactly what makes them successful.

Gerhard Drexel studied business administration at the universities of St. Gallen and Innsbruck. After years as a consultant at the Malik Management Center St. Gallen, he moved to the board of Spar Austria in 1990. As a long-standing CEO, in 2020 he succeeded in making the company the market leader in the Austrian food trade with spirit and humanity. Gerhard Drexel has been Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Spar Austria since 2021.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783990017135
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum01.12.2023
Seiten278 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse3473 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.13132002
Rubriken
Genre9201
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Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

1
The spirit: A decisive factor in competition
1.1
It is the spirit behind success or failure

Friday, 13th - a day I am sure to remember for the rest of my life. It is Friday, March 13, 2020. The Austrian federal government announces a nationwide total lockdown for the first time in history due to the spread of COVID-19. Only few industries - those considered essential, including all grocery stores - are exempt from the lockdown measures. And so, SPAR Austria is part of the critical infrastructure and in my twentieth year as CEO of this wonderful company, I am suddenly faced with the greatest professional challenges in my career.

That Friday, 13th sees one meeting after another. Some of them (still) actually take place in person, while others are already video conferences with fellow members of the board, managing directors, product-range managers, and other management staff. What did I tell all the people I was speaking with in the meetings back then? I encouraged them and told them with deep conviction: We ll emerge stronger than we were before this crisis! Meanwhile, the product-range and product managers were tasked with [developing] especially at this time of lockdown many attractive new SPAR own-brand products and [bringing] them to market as quickly as possible!

Back on that Friday, March 13, 2020, not one of us knew whether the lockdown would last several weeks or months, whether there would be more closures throughout the year, whether hundreds or even thousands of our staff at our 1,500 supermarkets and hypermarkets in Austria and another 1,400 grocery stores in neighboring countries would fall ill with COVID-19, whether we would have sufficient employees to maintain food supplies. Neither did we know whether we would be receiving sufficient goods from our suppliers to ensure our shelves were well-stocked.

But we all pulled together and showed empathy when faced with our customers and suppliers - and especially our employees - needs and concerns. What particularly set us apart from all the competition back then was that special spirit - that legendary SPAR spirit, the founding spirit that motivated and inspired us. What is interesting is that we all refer to that special kind of spirit as the same thing throughout the company: The SPAR spirit - or the Spirit of SPAR - has a deep meaning with us. Over the years, we have managed to impart that Spirit of SPAR to such an extent that virtually all our employees feel a part of it and consider it part of their professional identity. I would even go so far as to say that our employees - some 50,000 in Austria and around 90,000 overall - consider themselves part of the big SPAR family. After all, they are all working in a family-owned company that has never gone public.

So, how did the story end? Very well! In the first weeks and months of lockdown, we recorded lower sickness rates than usual among our staff. I am incredibly proud of our staff, especially the store assistants. They absolutely deserved to be called everyday heroes and to be celebrated the way they were. All of a sudden, they were on par with medical staff, standing shoulder to shoulder with doctors, surgeons, and nurses.

But our SPAR spirit is far from just a familiar and caring spirit, it is also competitive! We have reached top form in our communication with customers, in the sum of all market-oriented measures. Some market observers even go so far as to claim that we have surpassed ourselves.

Here are the results: By April 2020, a dramatic shift in market share sees us become the market leader in Austria and we manage to maintain this successful run over the months that follow, making SPAR Austria the market leader for the first time in the history of Austrian retail over 2020 as a whole. 2020 saw us increase our market share from 32.8 percent (2019) to 34.6 percent, while the long-time number one -REWE - lost market share, dropping from 34.3 percent (2019) to 33.3 percent in 20201, relegating it to second place for the first time in 25 years. Twelve years previously, in 2008, REWE had enjoyed a 6.5 percentage point lead in market share over SPAR2 - a figure that is considered near unassailable in our industry.

In each of these last twelve years, we have been able to narrow the gap in market share between us and REWE. And the ultimate victory in terms of our market share in 2020 came about as a result of our brilliant 16-percent growth in sales in Austria, while our competitors saw a total growth of six to seven percent that year.

What became of my request to all our product-range and product managers on that Friday, March 13, 2020, to develop and launch as many attractive new SPAR own-brand products as possible? I was delighted to see that a total of 650 new SPAR own-brand products were developed and added to the range at our group headquarters in Salzburg over the whole of 2020. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that many food and consumer-goods manufacturers found themselves caught in a kind of shock-induced paralysis, showing little to no ability to take any initiative.

There must be something that never appears on any balance sheet or income statement, something outside of the traditional business-management doctrine, something outside of what is immediately perceptible: It is the spirit - and that it what matters!
1.1.1
Companies only ever become truly valuable with inner values

So it is the spirit that is the difference between success and failure, i.e., the prevailing spirit3 - although it cannot be allowed to rule entirely! Spirit is meant in the sense of a way of thinking, a mindset, a mental approach and drive, a value system, and a structure of a company and its representatives.

The spirit manifests itself within a company by way of values, an attitude, and a unique corporate culture.

The spirit is also evident in a company s attitude and expectation
â to never stand still,
â to consistently seek to develop further and
â to adjust to evolving environments as proactively as possible.

A company s spirit depends very much on the role a company sees itself playing.
â Is it a passenger or a pilot?4
â An extra or a director?
â A ball in a game or a key player?
â A victim or a shaper?
â Subject to competition or a company that redefines the rules of the game in the industry?

Companies with inner values and the spirit that works for them meet their staff s need for spiritual moments and experiences that they yearn for in their company.

Staff yearn
â for the company as a whole to play a meaningful role in the economy and society,
â for the specific function that the individual member of staff performs to be meaningful and
â for the company to offer opportunities for the individual member of staff to identify with it.

Intuition is strong among employees, and they can sense whether the spirit that is prevalent - that is not to say rules - in a company comes from the heart or is merely an instrumentalized pretext. Even Johan Wolfgang von Goethe said: What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.

The common values are what is decisive for a company. A company should not subscribe to what interest groups or political parties expect. Rather, it should stick to its own devices, ploughing straight ahead in line with its own values that it stands by in an authentic way - both inwardly and outwardly.

For employees, it makes all the difference how colleagues treat and speak to each other. As Arnold Mettnitzer explains, humans long for nothing as much as a language that soothes, comes from the heart and reaches the heart.5

Father Dr. Johannes Pausch, founder and long-time prior of the European Monastery Gut Aich in St. Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang, my spiritual teacher and friend, considers companies to be on a path to success precisely when they are credible and convincing as a whole - in their entirety. Humans, and human relationships more than anything else, that are expressed in basic ethical decisions are key to success. 6
1.1.2
The causal chain: Leading the market through spirit

Over the last ten to twelve years, prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, journalists often asked me when it would be that SPAR Austria, as a good and dynamic number two in the Austrian grocery trade, would overtake the longstanding number one - REWE - to become the market leader. They asked me that question because we had grown faster than the market leader in Austria in terms of turnover every year since 2010, so that the gap between us and market leader REWE was narrowing year on year. Knowing that the annual changes in market share in grocery retail are usually in decimal points and that our gap to REWE was still considerable, I always answered with deep conviction as follows:7

For us,...
mehr

Autor

Gerhard Drexel studied business administration at the universities of St. Gallen and Innsbruck. After years as a consultant at the Malik Management Center St. Gallen, he moved to the board of Spar Austria in 1990. As a long-standing CEO, in 2020 he succeeded in making the company the market leader in the Austrian food trade with spirit and humanity. Gerhard Drexel has been Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Spar Austria since 2021.