This book could not be more timely. Any leader seeking to understand what it takes to win in the ruthlessly competitive markets most of us are faced with today will benefit from reading it. In my thirty-two years as a retailer (beginning as a “Saturday boy” at Boots in Glasgow), I have personally witnessed a dramatic acceleration of the pace of change and the upending of assumptions we used to take for granted. Shopping behavior is changing dramatically. We are witnessing the end of advantages that made our 163-year-old Boots brand iconic. Consumers give businesses less permission to be wrong than ever before, and the Boots brand is not immune to this shift.

We were first introduced to Rita’s ideas when Boots Group merged with Alliance UniChem in 2006 to form Alliance Boots, and the breathing room that followed allowed us to take this newly formed company private in 2007. At that time we decided to transform the organization in a way that would enable us to operate very differently—by putting our customers first. Working with Rita, who is a gifted and original strategic thinker, we sought to embed many of the principles presented in this book into the leadership mind-set of our new organization. And we continue to do that today. We seek to be quicker and more decisive. We seek to be more candid, so that pending news—even negative news—travels fast and is immediately addressed. We seek to spend more time thinking about the future than we ever have before. We seek to break down silos so that our organization is appropriately structured to capture opportunities and act as one unified entity. Most of all, we seek to create courageous leaders—leaders who regard the fast pace of competitive exchange as exciting and who are fully engaged in creating an organization that can boldly capture opportunities and just as boldly move away from strategies and business practices that no longer represent opportunities.

When we started our evolution, many observers were skeptical. The Boots brand was tired and undervalued, they said, and the strategy poorly explained and not all that well executed. Moreover, our new business model, which combined a business-to-business wholesale operation with a customer-focused retail business, had seldom proved to be successful. But our results have proven our critics wrong. Measures assessing the recognition of our brand, satisfaction of our customers, and engagement of our employees are at record levels, and the profitability of Alliance Boots has been increasing by at least 10 percent every year since its privatization. And all this was achieved despite the global recession.

Our evolution, like yours, is far from over. We believe, however, that the concept of strategy presented in this book is invaluable. Strategy needs to change because customers and markets are changing faster than ever. The ideas in these pages provide a much-needed guide to a world of transient competitive advantage.

—Alex Gourlay
Chief Executive, Health & Beauty Division, Alliance Boots
Nottingham, United Kingdom, January 2013