Sears is a textbook example of what happens when MBAs take over a business.
Sears is a textbook example of what happens when MBAs take over a business.
Not just MBA. Sears is run by a hedge fund guy. He’s dismembering the company bit by bit.
The board laughed them out of the office....just like Blockbuster laughed at Netflix.
Sears could have been Amazon. They already had the legendary catalog And yes, the lingerie section rocked growing up in the early 80s. All they had to do was make the leap to cyber space and not bought Kmart. Which was the dumbest decision since Atari made the ET video game.
I’m in marketing at the ground roots. I have a feeling I could have Sears back in the game within two years. Their problem is those MBAs you mentioned didn’t, EVER connect with the Heartland, because they don’t understand it at all.
Pity. It wouldn’t be that hard to make Sears exciting again.
“Sears is a textbook example of what happens when MBAs take over a business.”
For sure. Sears created the Amazon model over a century ago. Bezos had the genius to adapt it for the 21st century. Think of it, process;
Search for item. Sears, review catalog. Amazon review database
Order entry. Sears, fill out form. Amazon, fill out order screen.
Place order. Sears, mail form. Amazon, hit enter.
Order fulfillment. Essentially same, Amazon utilizes current technology.
Shipment. Sears originally utilized USPS. Amazon utilizes UPS, FEDEX.
The same people that destroyed the RNC under Bush I, the Brennan Bros, damaged a healthy Sears during the same time frame. It took a long time for the Sears board to act. But they finally put in a good man, Martinez.
Martinez had the right plan to re-build Sears in the early 90s. We workers in the trenches at the bottom were with Martinez. I was in inventory replenishment. My team lead and our team wanted to implement Martinez plan.
Middle management from assistant VP down to Director and Manager were united in opposition to Martinez, and profitability. Sears was over-bloated with middle management ... many dozens of layers of managers working off of Quarterly Reports.
Both Martinez, we workers at the bottom and suppliers like Lee and Levi wanted to ship direct from the supplier to each retail store, omitting the warehouse system that was a 1950s expensive overhead. Middle mangagement, all several dozen layers were unanimously opposed to a real time system. They insisted the real time system be used to produce the quarterly reports which their middle management team would then peruse to reorder.
Working in IT across the aisle from me was a team that wanted to turn Sears Catalog into Amazon before there was an Amazon. They had the right idea. But the Sears Catalog department and middle management were opposed. They argued that pictures in the Catalog sold the product and Computers just could not present pictures. They were only good for character based processing.
Sears and IBM bought prodigy and did not follow the advice of the young guys with no seniority. The VPs did not know what to do with Prodigy.
Sears and IBM built the first cloud in the late 80's, Advantis. I was on that cloud consulting from 5 different big client companies. It was great. But the VPs had no concept of where IT was going.
Virtually all of these VPs and middle management were older guys with BAs who would have been rock stars in the 1950s. They were not MBAs.