SMITH BRAIN TRUST – This shift to remote work had already been growing before many of us abruptly started working from home eight months ago. The COVID-19 pandemic is just accelerating the process. Some companies – Twitter, Facebook, Zillow, Raytheon, Square – have already declared many employees will work remotely going forward.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – The announcement this week that a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE was shown to be more than 90% effective and on track to potentially become widely available in 2021 is being hailed as a momentous breakthrough.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – As we head into the holiday season, health officials are warning that family gatherings could fuel the pandemic. To be prudent, making – or breaking – plans with even close family and friends might require some difficult conversations.
Open discussion with participants about the challenges and issues they face in the retail industry.
Facilitated by: Jie Zhang
Utilizing Data Analytics to Build A Winning Retail Business
This session will cover retail performance metrics and how to utilize them to diagnose problems and improve retail decisions. It will focus on those performance metrics that can be implemented using a retailer's existing inventory management and bookkeeping infrastructure (so that they can be easily adopted by SMR's). We will also discuss more advanced metrics and frameworks that have been utilized by sophisticated retail operations and the additional data/resources required.
Retail industry trends and implications for small and Mid-sized Retailers (SMR)
This session will focus on 1) the "big picture" and major trends of the industry, more or less organized by different retail sectors; 2) the implications for SMR's; 3) discuss strategies to address these challenges from the perspective of SMR's.
Facilitated by: Jie Zhang
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Lockdowns, high-profile bankruptcies, surplus stock spilling out of backrooms – the pandemic has rattled the already struggling retail sector.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Just weeks into the pandemic, Nicole M. Coomber began noticing a worrying trend. Upwardly mobile professionals across her social media networks were opting to step back from their careers, overwhelmed by the new demands of their work lives and home lives.
Andy Shallal, MBA ’19, has seen first-hand how COVID-19 is impacting the restaurant industry across the greater D.C. region and beyond. Despite the challenges, Shallal believes it’s not time for restaurant and business owners to throw in the towel just yet.
The unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on people’s daily lives has facilitated changes ranging from social interactions to purchasing behavior. Adjusting to the many disruptions may seem difficult, but people are more adaptive than you might think, says new research from Maryland Smith.
