IKEA's founder resisted changing the business model, and that skepticism cascaded through leadership. A country manager balked at costly new tech like order-management systems and converting stores to fulfillment hubs because it would hurt his short-term profit targets and bonus, even though the investments were necessary for online growth.
Starting from the top, even the founder of IKEA was not convinced that there is a need to change the business model. So you can imagine cascading, uh, how much was the resistance, especially if not changing personal objective of leaders. Because approaching a change includes a lot of cost. Actually, take an example, a country manager. I was the one going into the country saying to the country manager, look, we need to implement new technologies, we need to implement order management system, we need to change our processes, we need to transform our stores from being pure stores to be also fulfillment node because we will have a ramp-up of e-commerce requests that we need to fulfill most probably from the store and not from a distribution center to be profitable. And the ticket for this is X million euros. And these X million euros are impacting your P&L of this year. So you will not reach your objective and you will not get your bonus. Basically, this is in a nutshell saying
