I was settling in with my new copy of The New Yorker, and read James Surowiecki’s Financial Page, on how the Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo (where the one and only Andy Greenberg gets his skinny ties) has managed to become so successful. The counter-intuitive answer? Uniqlo hires lots of salespeople to make sure that when people enter the store, they find things and buy things. Counter-intuitively, cutting your workforce to raise margins can actually result in a death spiral where you don’t sell anything. Who would have thought.
