Leadership: Run Tests

How did you approach testing new ideas or putting your own ideas to test as the boss, as the leaders of a company?

I’m a firm believer in testing. I won’t say there’s no idea that’s a bad idea, but there are tons of ideas that might work, might not work. I think the only way to figure them out is to test them. I think in our earlier call, you and I talked about JC Penny and Ron Johnson and I’m not saying anything against Ron Johnson, but they decided they were going to go down this path and spent tons of capital per store and changed things up. They never tested it. Once they spent all of their capital, they figured out that this wasn’t working, and they weren’t making any money. Rumor has it, they’re going to go bankrupt in the next couple of weeks. I think that it’s really important to test.

If you’re Game Stop and you have 6,000 stores, taking 20 stores and converting them into pop culture or taking 20 stores and doubling the size of the accessory offerings. You need to do that. The key with testing is two things, one is, you’ve got to make sure you collect the data, so it’s disciplined testing. I can’t even count on one hand the number of times companies have tested stuff and they have no ideas what the results were. The second is, if the test doesn’t work, you kill it. You get rid of it and you go onto the next thing. If it works, you implement it as fast as possible, so it’s in all of your stores. I’m a huge believer in testing.