Thursday, July 21, 2011

On the closing down of Borders bookstores


My blogbuddy and best-selling author Larry Correia has an excellent analysis of why Borders shut down this week. He maintains it had nothing to do with the rise of e-books, as Borders management claim, and everything to do with mismanagement and corporate ineptitude. Here's a part of his experiences with the chain.

When I do a book signing at Barnes & Noble (the other big box book store), their managers are universally helpful, the staff is normally very knowledgeable. I’ve never had an event at a B&N where they forgot to get books. I’ve never had an event at a B&N where they didn’t seem glad to have me and my fans there. Event at Borders? I’d have a fifty-fifty chance of having management give a damn. Maybe fifty-fifty on the employees, who were usually just listlessly serving time. And only Borders (and one particular Indy store that shall remain nameless) have actually scheduled me to have a book signing, and then forgotten to order any extra books. This has happened to me twice at two separate Borders.

. . .

My reception at Borders usually ranged between negative to blah… It got to the point that if I had to choose between stopping at an Indy, a B&N, or a Borders, I would hit the Indy first, then the B&N, then the other B&N, then every other B&N within 20 miles, and then maybe the Borders… Unless I was hungry, tired, bored, or maybe just wanted to go back to the hotel in case there was something more important to do, like watch reruns of Walker Texas Ranger.

. . .

Here is how the average Border’s drive by on release week would go. Stand forever at the customer service counter… Get one employee who goes, er, huh? You want to what? You write books? Oh… Okay… Whatever. Then I would go and sign my 0-2 copies. (right next to the forty thousand copies of various True Blood tie-ins) Nobody would care. Then I would ask myself why I bothered stopping at Borders and drive to the next B&N.

Some were better than others. Some were downright pathetic. I’ve worked at crappy companies, where the morale is low because the employees know they are just waiting to get screwed by management. You can see it in their eyes. You can feel it in the air. Borders had that feeling.


Go read the rest of what he has to say.

How many other companies in America are run like this today? For that matter, how many companies anywhere are run like this? I suspect there are more than a few. In my time I've worked for some large multinational firms (BP, Shell, IBM). It was my experience that the further from the coalface you got, the more 'corporate group-think' had taken over. Success of middle to upper management was measured in terms of how well you played the management school game - Six Sigma; whether you'd implemented all relevant ISO standards (plus half a dozen that aren't); whether or not your entire team had been sent on (uber-expensive) Franklin Covey courses (following which they had to spend an hour or more each day documenting every billable second of their time using that organization's [equally expensive] planning and organizing products); and so on. The more senior these managerial drones became, the less they were interested in the company's actual field of business. Everything was generic management, not company-specific leadership.

Top management was the worst of all, leading all their lower-level supervisors down the primrose path with them. The late Robert Townsend, the one management guru for whom I have genuine respect, put it like this.

Top management is supposed to be a tree full of owls - hooting when management heads into the wrong part of the forest. I'm still unpersuaded they even know where the forest is.


If you're in business, and you haven't read Townsend's book "Up The Organization", you owe it to yourself to buy a copy and read it cover to cover - several times. When you've done that, throw away every other management book you've ever read. You won't need them any more.

It's a pity that none of Borders' senior management appear to have read it.

Peter

10 comments:

David Wilson said...

Good insights from your friend, Peter. Thanks for the book recommend too.

Stranger said...

To be fair, the Borders in Russellville, Arkansas, did not fit the profile. One, out of perhaps three dozen I have wandered into hoping to buy at least something to read. Goodbye, Borders, and good riddance.

Stranger

Roger Ritter said...

"Up the Organization" is by far the best management book I've ever read. There is a sequel, "Further Up the Organization", that takes into account the rise of women into management (since the first was written back in the sixties, I believe). Both are worthwhile reads if you work in any sort of corporation.

Dad29 said...

As an outside consultant, I have to agree with your observations...in the main. (Now and then there ARE exceptions.)

It's far worse in the HR departments, by the way. Most of those people cannot tell you what their Company does--or manufactures--to save their lives, and have ZERO concept of what constitutes a successful employee.

What you identified is the "all people are interchangeable blocks" syndrome. This goes hand-in-hand with the "we can train you to do anything" syndrome.

Moronic.

Anonymous said...

I've always considered an MBA a Masters of Bureaucratic A**holery, and I've got one myself. Business schools seem to teach manipulation of yesterday's organizational structure primarily.

Anonymous said...

I can tell you that AT&T Wireless is run exactly like that...

And don't even get me started on HR drones. The most useless batch of demi-humans ever inflicted on people trying to get some actual bloody work done.

Tom Bridgeland said...

Good Borders here in Rockford, Illinois. Sorry to lose them. Better than the local B&N.

Don said...

Our local Home Depot is just like this. You can never find someone to help you find anything, and if you can find someone they seem irritated that you've interrupted their busy nose-picking session. We don't even bother going in there anymore.

Bob@thenest said...

I went to the link and read the whole article and every comment. It sure seems to me that upper management at Borders would fit right into just about any senior position in our federal governmnet.

lelnet said...

The only difference between a sufficiently bureaucratic corporation and the government is that the government has guns. Which is still a pretty important difference. :)

I make it a point not to work for any organization large enough to have grown tumors of "middle management". Things can work better when team leaders (who typically care about the work) report directly to corporate officers (who typically care about the health of the company), instead of to middle managers (who are too busy fighting with one another over bureaucratic turf to care about anything else).