I remember this story but I can't remember the specifics and my queries to google have maximum SEO keywords. So if someone remembers and can fill in my blanks please and thank you.
There was this CEO who was brought onto a failing US retail company. His big idea to save the company was to foster internal competition. His logic was if the free market was the most efficient way to structure a society then doing that internally in a company would make it more efficient. The company cratered for entirely predictable reasons.
Who was the CEO who was the company? Am I completely making this up?
As someone already said, Eddy Lampert brought Ayn Rand's ideology directly into Sears corporate management and expected every department to act like an island-nation warring with every other island-nation for funding and attention from the suits. The backstabbing and other assorted features of "enlightened self-interest" caused an Objectivist(tm) clown car crash that lit the circus tent of Sears on fire until it burned down.
ideologically committed libertarians can be almost charmingly naive
"OH MY GOSH! This company is run like a dictatorship! The owner just relays unquestionable orders down the workers! Where's the merit? Where's the striving individuals showcasing their talent to innovate?"
sweety, baby, darling, your whole world-view exists as a thin veneer to justify this fact, how did you not realize...?
personally I'm just mad there's no sicko emoji with the full upper body and window here
sometimes you want the classics :sicko-wistful:
I'm thin on details, but I believe the con all along was transfer the holdings of sears to a private entity controlled by whoever was doing the husking, and then collapse sears such that it's assets would all be reaped and held by the private entity. Basically moving all the assets of the public corporation into the private holding of the person running the public corporation into the ground.
From a certain point of view, its brilliant.
Enlightened self interest works, if the goal is to destroy everything so one or two assholes loot the remains.
This was the case for sure with Toys R Us. Vulture capital firm bought it and stood to profit from it's demise way more than it's success, stripped it for parts and then had media stories published about how no one wants to but toys irl anymore and how they were getting undercut by online sales.
I mean “drinking the Kool aid” already refers to poisoning yourself tho
I'm fascinated by self Kool-Aid drinkers who destroy themselves with it, like that "biohacker" CEO who was found dead in a sensory deprivation tank at 28
Steve Jobs. "Smarest man in the world", dies of an easily treatable cancer because he was too smart for cancer treatment.
I mean it was pancreatic cancer. It was one if the more treatable forms if it, so yeah he's a dipshit for not getting treatment, but let's also not pretend it was a less serious firm of cancer.
GEP-NET has a 97% survival rate with treatment. It's still cancer, but it's genuinely one of the most survivable cancers.
Literally all he would have had to do was not lie about it and do alternative medicine shit for five years and just get the damn transplant after the Whipple procedure didn't work, but also the only reason the Whipple didn't work is because he spent like 9 months doing the exact same alternative medicine shit instead.
Dude literally spent 9 months doing fake shit before giving in and getting the surgery because the woowoo didn't do anything. Then when the surgery failed because of the woowoo, he spent another 5 years doing the exact same shit before giving up and getting a transplant and then decided to do the exact same woowoo again instead of the post-operative treatments and died.
Dude just hated not dying from a form of cancer with a higher survival rate than being in a car.
See I knew it wasn't the "you're dead" pancreatic cancer, but I didn't know the survival rate and assumed it was like 50/50. That's fucking wild... so glad we have these brain geniuses ruling over us as God kings.
I kinda want to do a podcast episode about Sears because the story is just so insane, but it's only tangentially related to cars. I guess Sears did briefly sell cars in the '50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allstate_(automobile)
It's just amazing to think what may had been. Sears was like the largest catalog retailer in the world. Internet comes along and they double down on physical locations, and dropping their giant catalog. Just stubborn. Imagine if they had transfered their catalog to the internet? They could be running shit.
Eddy Lampert at Sears. Both my parents worked at corporate there. He lives on a private island off of florida, and flies into chicagoland main headquarters for work. He also was kidnapped for ransom as a child lol.
Capacity 14 passengers Crew 24
Even the accommodations are bloated and top heavy, just like the cryptofascist ideology.
Rich people always buy the ugliest boats, because they've never worked on one and don't know what beauty is.
This actually happens at giant tech companies a lot lol
Like Google, Meta, Amazon scale big
But I guess they also started doing this after they already became massive. And also not the entire company and not every single product/service line
it's also not always intentional. teams end up trying to fix the same problem because no one talks to each other.
Sears. Fucking sears. One of the strongest retail companies in America was destroyed bc one idiot mba read ayn rand. Sears could have crushed Amazon with competent leadership.
Amazing, considering they were the OG Amazon back in the boomer days.
I did some BA courses and you remember correctly, it wasn't just one company though, but something that was tried multiple times at multiple time periods, often cause of the dogma of the Chicago school and alike. A serious wave of that was in the late 90s after the Soviet Unions fall. It lead to the things you mentioned.
My favorite of something related, but that isn't quite the same is actually a hardware manufacturer that ended in fraud. They brought in an outside expert who took over as CEO and did increase internal competition and bet on fire, fire, fire anyone who doesn't excel and in any case the lower XX%. So that over time new people would join and the "good ones" would remain in the company or replaced by "better ones".
Miniscribe
https://hackaday.com/2022/04/14/weve-heard-of-bricking-a-hard-drive-but/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribeSo many companies do that shit where they make every employee compete for their own job based on some nonsense metrics. It's a genuinely awful idea and it fucks things up every single time, because even if your entire team is the best and brightest on the planet, one of you will perform worse than the others and get fired for it.
It's not quite the same thing, but John Birt, Director of the BBC in the 90s, made departments charge each other instead of working together as one company. So the renowned Radiophonic Workshop had to close because other departments hired cheaper outside studios instead and they couldn't make enough profit to keep going.
Company I work for is doing a Sears and its fucking hilarious to watch it crumble from the inside. Im deffo fucked tho lol
