Best of Pax Westona: May 2017

• ·         Alex Behring reveals his investment philosophy (Financial Times)
• ·         How to become a customer-centric grocer (BCG)
• ·         How discounters are re-making the grocery industry (BCG)
• ·         Empire launches major transformation initiative (Empire)
• ·         Who wants disease-resistant GMO tomatoes? Probably not Europe (Wired)
• ·         How the U.S. Army recruits and retains millennials (Kellogg Insight)
• ·         Drones go to work (Harvard Business Review)
• ·         H-E-B wins with fun, customer sourced own brand commercial campaign (Own Brands Now)
• ·         Is British fast fashion too fast (Racked)
• ·         General Mills loses the culture war (Fortune)

Best of Pax Westona: April 2017

• ·         Boston Dynamics has been using its robotic ‘dog’ to deliver packages in Boston (Recode)
• ·         Walmart’s plan to trick people into saving money (The Atlantic)
• ·         A rare venture capitalist – female and retail-focused (New York Times)
• ·         Amex, challenged by Chase, is losing the snob war (New York Times)
• ·         How Dollarama became the retail king of knockoffs (Macleans)
• ·         How Amazon Go ‘probably’ makes ‘just walk out’ groceries a reality (Ars Technica)
• ·         How Trader Joe’s wine became cheaper than bottled water (Thrillist)
• ·         Strategic choices need to be made simultaneously, not sequentially (Harvard Business Review)
• ·         Amazon wants Cheerios, Oreos, and other brands to bypass Walmart (Bloomberg)
• ·         Amazon and Walmart are in an all-out price war that are terrifying America’s biggest brand (Recode)

Best of Pax Westona: March 2017

• ·         Reckoning in retail (L2)
• ·         Amazon’s ambitions unboxed (New York Times)
• ·         The brain in the supermarket (MIT News)
• ·         How Chobani’s Hamdi Ulkaya is winning America’s culture war (Fast Company)
• ·         Inside Amazon’s battle to break into the $800 billion grocery market (Bloomberg)
• ·         We have no idea how bad fast fashion actually is for the environment (Racked)
• ·         Capturing value from your customer data (McKinsey)
• ·         The rise (and fall?) of food writing (The Ringer)
• ·         Blockchain: A better way to track pork chops, bonds, bad peanut butter (New York Times)
• ·         An inside look at the ups and downs of Walmart’s journey (Harvard Business Review)

Best of Pax Westona: February 2017

• ·         Warren Buffet’s letter to shareholders (Berkshire Hathaway)
• ·         Inside the brutal transformation of Tim Hortons (The Globe and Mail)
• ·         Do sin taxes really change customer behaviour (Knowledge @ Wharton)
• ·         Amazon’s living lab: Re-imagining retail on Seattle’s streets (New York Times)
• ·         The making of a brand (The Collaborative Fund)
• ·         This company rents brains to PepsiCo and others with thorny problems (Bloomberg)
• ·         1 in 7 employees are stars. The best companies cluster them together (Harvard Business Review)
• ·         Should government control what low-income people eat (Brookings)
• ·         Leading people too smart to be led (Harvard Business Review)
• ·         Robotic grocers have learned how to handle vegetables (MIT Technology Review)

Best of Pax Westona: January 2017

• ·         How the barcode changed retailing and manufacturing (BBC)
• ·         Stefano Pessina, Walgreens Boots Alliance, on dealmaking (Financial Times)
• ·         How products dwindle out of favor (Wall Street Journal)
• ·         The dark (and often dubious) art of forecasting food trends (New York Times)
• ·         The case against overly perky salespeople (Bloomberg)
• ·         How to be an effective early-stage employee. Hint: Be helpful (Medium)
• ·         Inside Sears’ death spiral (Business Insider)
• ·         Nestle looks for ways to boost stale growth as consumers snub unhealthy food (The Economist)
• ·         Canadian scientists are trying to make your tomatoes tasty again (The Globe and Mail)
• ·         How to stop short-term thinking at America’s companies (The Atlantic)

Best of Pax Weston: December 2016

• ·         How breakfast cereal got its sugar fix (The Globe and Mail)
• ·         Perception beats reality in pricing (Bain)
• ·         Customer loyalty is overrated (Harvard Business Review)
• ·         Millennials are fine without fabric softener. P&G looks to change that (Wall Street Journal)
• ·         The age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world (McKinsey)
• ·         A blueprint for the future of food (New York Times)
• ·         Inside Costco: The magic in the warehouse (Fortune)
• ·         How humans became consumers: A history (The Atlantic)
• ·         Building a better customer insight capability (BCG)
• ·         The sales practices of Europe’s leading consumer-goods companies (McKinsey)

Best of Pax Westona: November 2016

• ·         Are consumers turned off by too many choices? Not yet (Stanford GSB Insights)
• ·         The hidden war over grocery shelf space (Vox)
• ·         Sustainable sources of competitive advantage (The Collaborative Fund)
• ·         These professors make more than a thousand bucks a year peddling mega-mergers (Propublica)
• ·         How two trailblazing psychologists turned the world of decision science upside down (Vanity Fair)
• ·         No laptop, no phone, no desk: UBS reinvents the work space (New York Times)
• ·         How retailers can improve price perception, profitably (McKinsey)
• ·         M&S’s chequered history of global expansion (The Guardian)
• ·         The lost art of thinking in large organizations (MIT Sloan Management Review)
• ·         Why executives don’t trust their own data and analytics insights (Fast Company)