This a story about something I experienced years ago. A story that captures, better than any theory I could lay out, one of the central arguments of my book: why the fresh produce sector is so stubbornly heterogeneous in its management models, and why the standardised solutions that work brilliantly everywhere else crash and burn the moment you try to use them on fruit and vegetables.
It isn’t that we’ve never heard of the great management theories. It isn’t that the consultants from the big firms have never reached our sector. They’ve reached it. They keep reaching it. But they’ve been unable to see the fundamental differences between our world and other industries… and that’s exactly why they’ve failed.
The story is about Lean Management. But it could just as easily have been about the Balanced Scorecard, about Agile methodologies, or about any other management tool that revolutionised manufacturing and then, the moment it crossed the border into our world of fruit and vegetables, smashed headlong into a reality it simply didn’t understand.
Listen to this episode if you want to know why and how consultants fail in the Fresh Produce Sector.
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