This is a great story of how Barnes & Noble’s new CEO who was hired in 2019 has turned around the company. Sales are up, it opened 16 stores this year and plans to open more next year.
The secret is the CEO really likes books and readers. So he stopped doing deals with publishers to promote their latest books & NYT best sellers and encouraged individual stores to promote books they found most interesting.
So simple yet…
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and
Sometimes it’s just as simple as good management that cares about the product.
This was the lesson I learned from Satya taking over Microsoft and it’s enlightening to see it play out at another company.
@carnage4life Very similar to what they did with Waterstones in the UK — reducing head office control, giving branch managers more flexibility and “returning to traditional book-selling methods”. Crazy talk!
@m @carnage4life The article says that’s no coincidence: the CEO of Barnes & Noble is the same person who turned Waterstones around!
@pwinn @carnage4life Its so funny how that happens - top management which has become so divorced from reality that it’s incapable of seeing that the obvious solution to their problems is “do the thing you used to do and which worked pretty well”.