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Among the companies in transition these days — those retail organizations trying to remake themselves — several have made impressive first steps, bringing new senior managers onboard, reorganizing strategic initiatives, rethinking the kinds of stores they plan to open going forward.
Among the companies in transition these days — those retail organizations trying to remake themselves — several have made impressive first steps, bringing new senior managers onboard, reorganizing strategic initiatives, rethinking the kinds of stores they plan to open going forward.
Among this group, a handful of retailers stand out — for different reasons. Walgreens must be applauded for attempting an integration whose size, scope and geographical challenges have no retail precedent. Walmart should certainly be recognized for bringing in a new senior management team, then tasking that team with re-prioritizing the type of stores it will rely on to attract customers in the years ahead.
Target should be studied for asking a just-hired top manager to repair a company that, as recently as a year ago, was no in obvious need of repair, but has since been buffeted by a series of ill winds that might have destroyed a retailer of lesser prominence, stature or promise.
Other examples abound, situations where retailers have been suddenly blind-sided by events that called for a radical revision of carefully laid plans and programs that, in ordinary times, would have worked to push the company forward.
Amid all this retrenching, one retailer deserves special attention, not for overcoming unanticipated adversities but for emerging from difficult challenges in a stronger position than it had occupied upon entering its days of uncertainty. That retailer is CVS/pharmacy, the retail unit of CVS Health.
Three years ago, the prevailing industry opinion was that CVS could not survive if survival was contingent on integrating its drug chain with its newly acquired Caremark PBM. No, these were — and remain — two very different businesses, neither having much in common with the other.
Today, those two businesses are effectively working independently and in combination to have propelled CVS into position as America’s leading retail health care organization. The individual entities — the CVS drug stores, the MinuteClinic medical care facilities, the Caremark PBM — each work independently of each other to the benefit of the patient/customer, collectively when they can be even more beneficial by working in concert.
The result is that CVS today manages lives, while its competitors in the retail marketplace are still striving to gain that reputation. More than that, the reputation that CVS has earned for its ability to manage patient outcomes has benefitted each CVS unit, bringing customers, sales, earnings and new business across the spectrum of CVS entities.
Atop this challenge, CVS has, within the past year, been forced by circumstances to identify and hire a new president for the drug chain. This was not an assignment that could be delayed or deferred. To ask a company to operate without a president is a burden no U.S. entity should be asked to endure in these competitive and challenging times. CVS rose to this challenge in a particularly impressive way, naming Helena Foulkes, a company veteran, to the post of CVS/pharmacy president as 2013 wound down.
In her year at the head of the CVS drug chain, Foulkes has been more than equal to the job. She has injected a new sense of the possible into the organization. She has crystallized a series of initiatives that had been little more than vague ideas under her predecessor’s tenure. She has given key staffers more responsibility and authority, which they have eagerly accepted. And she has mapped out a future for the drug chain which, if executed properly, will maintain CVS’ position at the front ranks of U.S. mass retailers.
Some industry people still wonder whether Foulkes can continue to lead in the dynamic and aggressive way that has characterized her first year as president. Those who do clearly don’t know her. Nor do they know the executive who chose her, CVS Health chief executive officer Larry Merlo. When Merlo gave Foulkes the job he also gave her the authority and responsibility for executing it. This Foulkes has done, more efficiently than those who don’t know her would have imagined. From day one, she has grasped and executed the challenges laid out for her with the certainty, the courage, the confidence of a veteran.
Which is what Foulkes is. She may be new to the job, but she is a CVS veteran — and, as such, one of the very few retail executives anywhere that Merlo could have picked while expecting the same results Foulkes has seemed so effortlessly to produce.
