“I have run retail in both directions, and that is the only reason I am confident making this argument. I was COO of Lidl’s GB and Irish businesses and held board responsibility at Primark, which is about as deep inside the European operating model as it is possible to sit. I was then Managing Director and CEO of Star Bazaar, the Tata-Tesco hypermarket business in India. Same person, same instincts, two completely different sets of physics.

“What I got wrong in my first 6 months in India, including not planning for the Covid 19 outbreak, was assuming the sequencing would be the same. In Europe you build the estate, then you digitise it. That is not a strategy anyone chose—it is an accident of chronology: the stores were already there, so the technology had to be retrofitted onto them. In India the estate and the digital layer were being built in the same eighteen months, which meant we could design the operating model around the customer’s actual behaviour rather than around a property portfolio somebody signed in 1997.

“Star Bazaar went from loss-making and single-channel to a profitable omnichannel retailer in three years, with own-brand participation lifting from 4% to 38%. It was not merely a turnaround; it was a leapfrog, possible because there was less to unbuild.

“’Fresh Approach’ concept at Lidl Ireland- 2017 is the counter-example that proves the point. It was the first customer-centric store operating model in Lidl’s history and it nearly doubled our Irish market share. But the hardest part of that programme was the unbuilding: undoing a warehouse-led model that worked, that people were proud of, and that had thirty years of process wrapped around it.

“I am now advising on building discount retail in the emerging markets. What I am doing there is applying European discipline to a market that does not carry European drag. That combination is the whole thesis of this edition.” — MWB Advisory

The Unbuilt Advantage Audit (MWB Advisory Framework)

Before deciding how to commit capital, boards must decide whether they should be committing it at all, or importing a model from a market that already solved the problem without it. Run these three questions in your next strategy session:

1. #Legacy Drag: What share of your current fulfilment and store technology capex is maintaining an estate you would not build today if you were starting from a blank sheet? If your finance function cannot split maintenance of legacy from investment in future capability, you lack the information required to make a sound capital allocation decision.
2. #Skip Rights: Which upgrade steps can you skip entirely, rather than sequence? India’s quick-commerce networks skipped the hypermarket. Shoprite in Zambia skipped the card to go straight to mobile wallets. Skip rights are the single most valuable asset an under-built market has, and they expire the moment you build the legacy asset.
3. #Reverse Import: Which format, technology, or operating practice from your emerging market operations should you now be exporting into your developed markets? If a multinational’s answer is “none,” innovation is only permitted to travel downhill—a clear governance failure.

The Four-Lens Regional Framework