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Maintaining Success: The Secret Behind Long‑Lasting Improvements
When Gucci’s sales flat‑lined in 2014, the Italian label did something quietly radical: it invited a “shadow board” of thirty‑somethings to sit alongside senior directors. The millennials shredded legacy assumptions about online drops and gender‑fluid styling; by 2024 those ideas had pushed revenue up 136 %, while rival Prada—without a shadow board—shrank in the same period.
On the other side of Europe, Carlsberg’s Copenhagen research lab tackled the brewery’s chronic development delays. Engineers fitted fermenters with aroma‑sensing electrodes and fed the data to Microsoft’s machine‑learning models. The once 12‑month recipe cycle now averages eight months, saving an estimated €10 million a year in pilot‑batch waste and giving the brewer enough headroom to weather barley price shocks in 2023.
Yet even breakthrough tech wilts without culture, a lesson SKF’s Gothenburg bearing plant learned after a 2017 production crisis. Manager Ajay Naik hung blank “Kaizen walls” and challenged line operators—not consultants—to cover them with fix‑it ideas. More than 5,000 suggestions later, unit costs are down, margins up, and the European Organization for Quality now ranks the site among the continent’s top three factories.
Across fashion, beer and heavy industry, the common thread is not mystery but discipline: improvements endure when insiders keep poking holes in yesterday’s solution, metrics are tied to money, and leadership resists the temptation to declare victory the moment the charts turn green.
