A Response to Mina Kimes' "The Sun Tzu at Sears"

This blog is late due to me somehow not hearing the blog was supposed to start on day two of class. I apologize.

• Using such words as "consiglieri," comparisons to Sun Tzu, and dictator-esk war-like imagery, the author is posing Eddie Lampert to be a ruthless man through initial inspection of the article. It's obvious that this is not going to be a very kind piece before even starting the actual reading.
• The article makes many assuming claims that are backed mostly by anonymous people. I am not saying the author is making these people up, but we have to assume she is telling the truth as she did not use many names of the people making claims in these interviews.
• I am personally adverse to anarcho-capitalism, something that Lampert seems to like the idea of. I understand that competition can be a strong factor in driving business, but I think there are other ways of promoting business and technological growth without clawing at the eyes of other businesses.
• His seemingly incessant model of competition seems flawed from the start. Why would you encourage your own company to decrease the profits of one another? He should look at each branch on an individual basis rather than pinning them against one another. 
• Instead of rewarding what is best, he should reward what is getting better. This will create an incentive for each branch to improve at no cost of the other branches. The "competition" comes in the rewards of increasing performance. In other words, each branch can compete with themselves. However, I think the issues that Sear Holdings' faced are an outcome of capitalism; Lambert just made the process faster and on a smaller, more observable level. 
• I agree with Lampert's notion that operating Sears in individual parts can have benefits that provide "significantly better information and drive decision-making and accountability at a more appropriate level." However, this idea is held in my aforementioned proposal. With my idea, the branches can be evaluated and operated individually. The only, and very major, difference is that the competition comes in improving rather than becoming the best. 
• This proposal comes with an obvious counterargument that I think is silly: Well, in that case, the branches may have incentive to improve, but they don't have the incentive to improve as much in Lambert's model. However, this can be remedies with incentives based on growth. A company with a 5% growth can get a recompense larger than that of a 2% growth. This promotes the greatest amount of growth possible while always remaining financially beneficial for the company as the reward of such an achievement will growth will surely be less than the incentives. And by nature of growth of the individual branches, the brand as a whole becomes larger—meaning there is incentive for the branches of the company to work as a whole while still optimizing their individual branch.
• The data then gained from my proposal can be used with the other branches that are not operating as well. If the data shows that a certain trait is causing a notable increase in growth, this can become a centralized part of the company's operation. These sort of incentives are what promotes managers to be inventive!
• I know very little about business, but the process of splitting your company into smaller parts seems detrimental. As a consumer, I very much prefer convenience over anything else (i.e. Amazon  or Walmart, businesses that I can go to and expect to find what I need). Sears was once the one-stop-shop for everything, and I find that to be a very appealing business type. Additionally, this integrated model can promote other sides of the business that a decentralized model can't. For instance, if I go to Walmart for groceries and see a shirt that I like while strolling between the food isles, I have a reason to buy something that I did not originally intend on buying.
• Also, I am willing to pay premiums for convenience (and I supposed others are too). For instance, I have both a Netflix and Hulu subscription. I primarily use Netflix for movies and Hulu for television shows. I pay $23 a month for both subscriptions, but if a company were to come along and provide me both movies and television shows for a higher price, I would use that platform even if it entailed me paying more. This example becomes even more exemplar if these were not online services, like Sears is/was not. 
• I find it concerning that such a notorious business man didn't find financial issue in the idea of breaking the company into individual branches while maintaining a similar hierarchy of jobs. It's very obvious that hiring a lot of new executives for the individual branches of SOAR would be costly, but there seemed to be no talk of that prior to the actual implementation of this top-heavy cost system. 
• My criticizing of Lampert's anarcho-capitalism seemed to prove true. After allowing the individual parts of Sears grow and ruin one another, adding an ability to pay for seats in the circular is so counterintuitive. How, under any circumstance, would Lampert and Co. not see how the less wealthy parts of the company would fall to the wayside? This is essentially running a government that allows for endless spending of campaign finances in which the most wealthy become the most prominent and therefore completely cannibalize the other parts. Lampart's ideals literally cannibalized his own company! How could he not see this?
• While it's probably not something that can be empirically measured, I am curious to how much of a role Lampert truly played in the demise of Sears. Sears is an old company that had it's feet deep in pre-technological ideals. It would be interesting to know if the infrastructure of Sears was simply too "old" unlike that of Amazon, presumably one of Sears' largest competitors, to be the superstore it once was. Lampert's attempt to move in the direction of Amazon was apparent and was done seemingly decently, but it may have just been too late for anyone to save Sears from becoming archaic. Perhaps consumers were simply too familiar with the old Sears to view it as a contemporary, innovative powerhouse like Amazon.