Mastodawn

Aram Zucker-Scharff Dec 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

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Aram Zucker-Scharff Dec 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

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mconnor

@Chronotope it’s also a mistake to assume that incompetent leadership had hired competent leaders to run their stores. Let alone that those folks actually had the knowledge and expertise to run an actual bookstore (and hadn’t left to run their own).

Stories like this are about successful collaboration between employees and management. It’s not enough to be passive, management has to continually improve the structure and incentives in partnership with the front lines.