
Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire - rosser
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/
======
Pinatubo
This article was actually written by someone from Alternet, which is why it
obsessively mentions Ayn Rand in every paragraph and contains so much over the
top invective.

I'm not sure it's a good idea for a more reputable media brand like Salon to
host articles like this, but it seems to be a trend -- Forbes for instance
allows "guest bloggers" to post content that can sometimes be as unhinged as
this piece.

------
holograham
Most of these cited failures have no root in Ayn Rand ideology whatsoever.
Selling rolexes at Sears is not a smart free market idea.

Not sure the details of how he "pitted" company managers against each other
but he perhaps did do an experiment in human organization theory that failed.

Free market ideology is not about pitting one manager against another...it is
about measuring how much value the market (consumers) get from a given
manager.

It sounds like this guy was anything but a free market advocate. Manipulating
stock prices through accounting gimmicks is NOT the basis of a free market
enterprise. The free market enterprise is always valued against how much
wealth the market willingly agrees to part with in exchange for even greater
value.

------
thucydides
This article is fairly tendentious, but the story itself is interesting and
was well-covered in a Bloomberg Businessweek article here:
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-
edd...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-
lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-trouble)

I'm not a Rand disciple, but organizational experimentation like what Eddie
Lampert did is a good thing, even though it's been a failure in this case. We
know so little about human organizations generally, and so few have been
tried, that it borders on insanity to argue that the large business
corporation, a form that has existed for only a couple centuries, has been
perfected. Specifically, they nearly always have a CEO on top who has the
power and trappings of an absolute monarch issuing orders to courtesans, who
do the work or delegate the work to lieutenants, who do the work or delegate
to lieutenants, etc. Are we so unimaginative that we think this is the SOLE
way of doing things? Consider, for example, Valve's success with their novel
organizational structure, what Michael Church calls "open allocation."

~~~
r00fus
> We know so little about human organizations generally, and so few have been
> tried, that it borders on insanity to argue that the large business
> corporation, a form that has existed for only a couple centuries, has been
> perfected.

This is hardly a valid rationale for saying that what Lampert did was a good
thing. Unless you're going by the "fail upwards" strategy.

The embodiment of an ideal is only as good as it's execution. Lampert's was
clearly a failure. How can you call what he did as "good"? At best he was
attempting a Sisyphean task (Merging Kmart and Sears), but then again, that
was his idea as well.

Ultimately, I fail to even see that Lampert was punished for his failure -
nothing in the article says that this corporate raider didn't do exactly what
he intended - i.e., to profit by the destruction of companies.

~~~
thucydides
Unless we have good reason to believe the standard CEO-as-monarch structure is
perfect, experimentation is a good thing. Moreover, his basis for suspecting
his particular experiment might work was reasonable, since he was basically
applying by analogy a standard neoclassical model of how a market at large
works to his individual business. Before he implemented the structure, would I
have expected it to fail? Yes, but I expect most start-up ideas to fail, too.
You never know. We can't forget that we learn as well from negative results as
from positive results. Solid analysis of Lampert's failure here helps all of
us, because we can see a little bit better what pitfalls to avoid in our own
organizational structures.

Admittedly, however, it is probably unwise to play radical, untested games
with the fundamental structure of a large and mature business, only because
the losses can be so much larger and more catastrophic. Better to test the
idea in a small or medium-sized business first. But it's a good thing for
people to experiment generally, and we learned here nonetheless.

It would be unfortunate if the only lesson future business leaders took from
this episode is never to deviate from the monarchical model of corporate
governance.

------
jere
Sorry, but I was far more interested by an irrelevant detail I read in a more
detailed article about Lampert: he was kidnapped in 2003.
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-
edd...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-
lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles)

>His notoriety grew in the early 2000s, when he launched a takeover of
bankrupt retailer Kmart. During negotiations, Lampert was kidnapped from a
parking garage in Greenwich, Conn., and held for two days...

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2004-...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2004-05-17-kmart-
kidnapper_x.htm)

>In exchange for his release, Lampert agreed to stash $40,000 in a garbage can
outside a Wendy's restaurant in Greenwich, prosecutors said. The money was
never paid. Instead, the FBI took up the case. They found that an associate of
the kidnappers had used a stolen credit card to order a pizza delivery.

------
guylhem
Why exactly is there "Ayn Rand" in the title?

If you still are not shocked, let's color the phrase a bit more : "Is it
really necessary for liberals to bash values they don't agree with, while
hiding their own shortcomings ?"

There, you are shocked - but you can find additional food for though on
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/12/media_bias_case....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/12/media_bias_case.html)
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/12/denver_posts_me....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/12/denver_posts_me.html)

Besides this "Colorado school shooter was an hardcore leftist and keynesian"
(shocking headline selected for additional emotional impact) this is not what
I often see in the news [http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/14/dead-colorado-
school-shoot...](http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/14/dead-colorado-school-
shooter-was-hardcore-leftist-keynesian/)

But I guess if the guy had believe in objectivism and had been right wing,
this would have justified headlines and a totally different wording - like
this article on Salon.

Ask yourself- why is it ok to do ad-hominem attack on one case, and not in the
other? Why are you shocked when the headlines mention the political beliefs
that you find totally normal, but you are not when the headlines mention Ayn
Rand?

Besides the shocking title, the content is awful. This article has nothing to
do on HN.

If downvoting this is easy, but explaining your disagreement is harder, my
suggestion: bias at work.

------
Pxtl
To be fair, Sears was setting off alarm-bells for being mismanaged and myopic
before he took charge.

But he obviously didn't help.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Sears was doomed when they scrapped their catalog operation, coincidentally
the same year that the first graphical web browser was introduced.

At one time Sears sold EVERYTHING, from a replacement zipper to a full precut
and ready to nail together house.

They basically had Amazon.com -- suppliers, warehouses, nationwide
distribution network -- _plus_ a brick and mortar outlet in every town of any
size, and threw it all away.

~~~
Pxtl
I know. Like I said, mismanaged and myopic. They were the Amazon of their day,
and they completely missed the boat on the Internet.

------
omonra
Articles like these make me wish that HN had a black-list of sites that only
publish partisan politicized crap journalism (regardless of actual brand of
ideology preached).

If they make a conscious decision to push one-way propaganda, they should not
be linked to in polite company.

