Aram Zucker-ScharffDec 29, 2022

I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge.

This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store...

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?

Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?

The Honest Broker
Show threadAram Zucker-ScharffDec 29, 2022

It's a mistake to assign the value being created here to the CEO, all he did was realize upper management needed to step out of the way & remove the bad incentive structure that stopped local stores from making their own decisions.

It's the realization the people in the bookstore are going to know what sells faster than execs waiting for a report in HQ and it's acknowledging that people who work in bookstores live in their communities and understand how those communities work & what they like

Show threadAram Zucker-ScharffDec 29, 2022
The lesson you should take from this parable as a manager isn't about passion, it's about what your job is: unblock your employees, trust the people you hired for their capability to manage your front lines, and a million analysts can't beat on the ground real-time knowledge. Especially when it comes to community businesses like bookstores, the most detailed knowledge and complex models aren't going to create a better plan to work with the community than the people in the community.
Show threadAram Zucker-ScharffDec 29, 2022

This story is basically an indictment of enormous corporate structures, huge national and international companies, centralized corporate power, and overloaded management. For B&N they clearly don't work. Not for pricing, stocking, shelving or marketing.

The win here is a CEO who realizes his most valuable action is to get out of the way.

It should be shocking to read that the winning revelation for B&N was: let employees do their jobs.

Now you gotta pay them more.

Show threadAram Zucker-Scharff

It is shocking that a huge bookstore company would rather try to open an entirely new off brand line of business like a restaurant then take the basic action of listening to their employees.

B&N almost went bankrupt rather than let its employees do the jobs it hired them for.

Wild that this win is assigned to management rather than the people who made it happen: the bookstore employees.

Hopefully the current CEO will continue to know better than those heaping praise on the executive class.

Dec 29, 2022 at 2:54pmWeb
Show threadaethervision Dec 29, 2022
@Chronotope B&N mostly died when they laid off booksellers like Pat Bostleman, Karen Perrea and Marcella Smith in 2010. The last straw was Jim Killian. Best sci-fi buyer in the industry. From then on, it’s been a matter of time.
Show threadCharles RoperDec 29, 2022

@Chronotope I work for a large charity founded in 1945 with many centres around the UK. Decentralisation worked to a certain extent and the centres ran themselves well enough. But without a unifying leadership, it became a mess. Like a team of elite athletes without a coach. There must be balance. It’s wrong to assume there is no role for leadership. But touch should be light if the org is working well. Tight grip is a bad sign. Good leaders have Fingerspitzengefühl.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengefühl

Fingerspitzengefühl - Wikipedia