The man who flushed Sears down the toilet

[moonshaz]

Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire

Comments

[firefox1490]

my mom is so pissed with Sears too.

They fucked up our washing machine and she's beyond words.

This sort of leadership would explain their shit service too.

[shortsweetcynic]

He became obsessed with technology, wasting resources on developing apps as Sears’ physical stores became dilapidated and filthy.

The Kmart by us just closed, and the Sears in the nearby mall (which, incidentally, was just sold; not sure if they'll try to rehab or just knock the whole mess down) is a fucking shithole, and has been for a long time; the quote above is 100% accurate.

[lettace]

....
This explains a lot, actually.

[rainbow_fish]

[skellington1]

I hear you. I'm sorry for the working-class jobs lost and the lack of what should be a competitor to walmart, but hearing about a filthy rich randdroid failing is just total schadenfreud pie.

Too bad his 'failure' makes him still 'filthy rich by anyone normal's standards.'

[romp]

FWIW, I'm convinced economics, like a lot of the field of business, is bullshit.

I base this on a New Yorker article on the history of management and the insightful comments of Ed Deak, a commenter on The Tyee news site. At 18, we was "sentenced to death by the Hungarian nazi military." Typical post from him:

The worst kind of priesthood today are the so called economists, who are using imaginary monetary figures pulled from the air to distort physical realities, morals, human rights and elementary logic.

[bananainpyjamas]

Economics (and business) is no more bullshit than other social sciences. The value of a particular model hinges a lot on the assumptions you make. The problem is that a lot of economists look down on "softer" social sciences like sociology and psychology, when some of the findings in those fields would be very useful in creating economic models/predictions that more closely reflect how people actually behave.

[romp]

I don't hear sociologists making predictions the way economists do, especially ones that claim to be infallible until they aren't. Did you read the first link? Pretty shaky foundation. There's a place for the study in how certain leadership styles work with different sorts of organizations but this article is about how bullshit philosophies are often pushed as The Truth.

[bananainpyjamas]

I think there's a difference between saying there's a problem with orthodoxy in economics and writing off the entire field as bullshit. And yes I'm familiar with the article you linked.