Replies

Here's spintreebob's take from an earlier thread:

05/31/2018 6:23:04 PM PDT · 64 of 79
spintreebob to null and void
Then some MBA decided that could cut expenses and raise prices. Not at all the Sears story. The Brenn and Brothers ran Monky Wards and Sears into the ground in the 80s.(The same boys who drove the GOP into the ground post Reagan as they controlled all RNC money.) They nutured a hierarchical structure of many dozens of layers of bureaucracy. The mid-level bureaucracy of men in their 40s and 50s and 60s were paid based on how inefficient they were.
The bigger their staff in Sears Tower, and then Hoffman Estates, the more important they were and the bigger their salary and perks. The stock holders finally got rid of Brennan and brought in Martinez.
Martinez brought in good people at the top. They had good ideas. But the Asst VPs, Directos, Managers.. 50+ levels of bureaucracy in Hoffman Estates actively and blatantly obstructed everything that the Matinez team tried to do.
The middle management also blocked every good idea from the bottom. I was on various IT teams as a consultant. My IT team lead had extremely good ideas on how to implement The Softer Side of Sears . His ideas involved checking what was selling in real time with my online programs. Lee, Levi and other suppliers were begging us to re-order in real time. In the back to school season, Sears most profitable season, we had no clue what styles would be hot... and if hot would vary by store location.
Online tracking of sales and re-order in real time was so obvious. But to do so would eliminate the entire buyer department of hundreds of self-important lazy buffoons and their managers.
Middle management insisted that they would run inventory re-plenishment off the quarterly report, meaning Back-to-school replenishment would be ordered about October 15, way too late to compete with Walmart and others.
A sister team to mine had a great plan on how to turn the Sears Catalog into an online catalog. It was a vision ... an Amazon. But Middle Management shot it down. All they saw were character based 3270s. They did not understand how people could shop on a computer because a computer had no pictures of the item like a catalog did. That is how much in the 1950s middle management was living in the 1990s.
Sears and IBM partnered to buy Prodigy and to create the first Cloud. Neither Sears nor IBM management had a clue what to do with what they bought. Middle management of both companies shot down every good idea, most of which came from the bottom in this case.
Lands End bought Sears and had good ideas. Sears middle management refused to implement them. Lampert bought Sears and Kmart for the real estate, not the retail business. Sears was one of the largest owners of real estate in the world.
Sears was not done in by some young MBA. It was done in by the Sears Swamp, the Sears establishment of middle aged and older men who wanted to protect their bureaucracy because their bureaucracy protected them.

It doesn't bode well for swamp draining.