Waypoints: Ideas and Insights to Navigate Enterprise Complexity

If you’ve never shopped at Ikea yourself, chances are that you know someone who has. And you’ve likely heard a horror story about attempting to assemble one of the furniture giant’s shipped-flat products. (If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, search the Internet for “Ikea assembly horror stories” and you’ll quickly get up to speed on the tragi-comic experiences that so many customers have shared.) Ikea has heard plenty of these stories, too, and a recent strategic move by the company shows that they have listened and adapted.

A colleague told me a story about fraud at a retail chain where she worked after college. The company was having a problem with cash theft in one particular store, so the district manager scheduled polygraph tests for the cashiers to find the culprit or culprits.

Volkswagen is in trouble. Independent testing revealed last fall that VW had cheated diesel emissions tests in the United States. This news precipitated a dramatic decline in the company’s stock price, investigations by the EPA and Congress, and threats of lawsuits from VW owners.