Book Report – We Are Market Basket by Daniel Korschun & Grant Welker

Most folks have a go-to supermarket when they need bread, butter, and Cool Ranch Doritos (you know, staples of any good pantry) and it’s likely you’re no different. Shoppers want to pay fair prices and yet for many it’s just as important to know a store’s rhythms and patterns so that what amounts to an annoying chore can be completed as painlessly as possible. But when was the last time you witnessed singing and dancing in the aisles? Found yourself steering your carriage around any conga lines lately? Tales of such wackiness were not unusual upon the 2014 settlement of the Market Basket labor strike (if that’s what you call it when non-union workers and executives protest). The company board’s removal of wildly popular CEO Arthur T. Demoulas (as well as many other up-through-the-ranks executives) lead to passionate unrest that culminated in six weeks of civil disobedience of the most unusual kind – namely employees, vendors, customers, and community members joining forces to ostensibly shut the grocer down – and let’s just say the natives went bananas when they got their man back on the job. All of this is captured in the excellent We Are Market Basket by Daniel Korschun & Grant Welker.

The reader is swiftly brought up and down aisles through the history of supermarkets, which started back in the 1940’s to solve the pesky problem of buying dairy, meats, and produce in three different locations (a first world pain if ever there was one). The lesson is a brief one as the authors quickly get to the point: the original Demoulas boys offered exceptional service along with shopper convenience and yet only some of their descendants got the memo. The core struggle surrounds the question of rank importance regarding shareholders and customers. Korschun and Welker make it clear that Market Basket was founded on a “customers first” philosophy that proved a wild success, the kind of success that lines the pockets of multiple generations, inevitably producing greedy family members who can’t possibly have enough yachts to water ski behind. The “clear, unique, and adaptable” culture that was so central in building this special business model buckles under the pressure of maximizing shareholder returns, and the farther away a fat cat beneficiary lounges from the core mission, the more he/she just wants to pretty the damn thing up for sale to the highest bidder already. Never mind the bollocks, here’s the exit.

Contained herein are a couple of terms I hadn’t heard before. One is what psychologists call social identification “in which a person feels a strong belonging to a group and begins to see others through that lens.” Put simply, you see this at work when employees use “we” rather than “I.” And when people – workers, vendors, customers – feel a strong membership at a company, researchers call it organizational identification. Market Basket has clearly done a bang-up job over the decades of developing a culture of belonging and inclusion. (Surely it helps that anyone hired from the outside starts by chasing carriages and ringing orders, creating a been there/done that environment with co-workers, eliminating the smarter-than-thou challenge that organizations face when they hire managers straight out of business school.) The authors go on to paint the picture of an empowered workforce and its impact on the company’s success. Naturally, the risk of a so-called distributed leadership model is the potential “when everyone is the boss, no one is the boss” conundrum. Of further concern is how tough it is to maintain a growth curve that keeps creating promotions for all these would-be ladder climbers and to continue funding the generous bonus program while ensuring that biannual distributions are always viewed as something special rather than as deferred income. Here’s hoping Mr. Demoulas and his team keep figuring these things out, lest they soon face a rather sticky clean-up on Aisle 12.