\u201cStaff are now in control of their own shops,\u201d [Daunt] explained. \u201cHopefully they\u2019re enjoying their work more. They\u2019re creating something very different in each store.\"<\/div>\n
Central to this staff-controlled approach, is the idea that no longer will B&N take promotional money from the publishers.\u00a0 Under the old way, publishers only had to cozy up to an upper-management purchaser to set down the featured titles for the entire chain.\u00a0 The titles were then forced upon each branch whether they liked it or not, whether the title would sell or not.\u00a0 Under this new approach, publishers no longer had one point-of-sale to B&N\u2019s head buyer at headquarters.\u00a0 They now had to engage in the hard work of engaging with each local book buyer.\u00a0 Furthermore they were now accountable if a new book fails to live up to the hype.<\/p>\n
This is where the microcosm idea comes in.\u00a0 In moving control away from B&N upper management to the \u2018boots on the ground\u2019 running each store, Daunt has played out a small drama between collectivism and central planning, on one hand, and liberty and individualism on the other.\u00a0 And the fact that he has turned around B&N by embracing individual control speaks volumes about the power of such ideas.<\/p>\n
There are many parallels between this microcosmic experiment and the larger macroscopic approach that was on display in the former Soviet Union.\u00a0 As Thomas Sowell points out in his book Applied Economics, Thinking Beyond Stage One<\/em>, the USSR had \u201c[t]he most thorough-going control of entire national economies\u201d but that the task of centrally managing \u201cwas a virtually impossible task for the central planners to perform well\u201d.\u00a0 As a result, Sowell points out that it was common to find warehouses packed with goods nobody wanted while eager consumers lined-up for the few goods that were highly demanded but which had been produced in too few numbers.<\/p>\nSowell is being charitable when he notes that the job of the central planner is virtually impossible.\u00a0 That charity presupposes that the central planner wanted to do a good job.\u00a0 As anyone whose interacted with his state\u2019s department of motor vehicles can attest, there are a class of civil servants who simply phone it in.\u00a0 They are lazy and strive each day (note the irony of that phrasing) to do as little as possible.\u00a0 This \u2018phone it in\u2019 behavior is strongly reflected in Gioia\u2019s own analysis of the interaction between publisher and central buyer.\u00a0 Under a decentralized system each of these groups were no longer disengaged from the consequences of their actions and were no longer accountable to virtually no one.<\/p>\n
Of course, there are many places where the parallels break down (e.g.<\/em>, it is unlikely that B&N will have nuclear weapons or will mount an invasion into a sovereign country) but those are differences of quantity not quality.\u00a0 By embracing a \u2018bottoms-up\u2019 approach, Daunt is empowering each store to stand or fall on its own by taking into account what the local sector of the economy it serve wants and needs rather than what a central planner decides. \u00a0That B&N is experiencing growth underscores the fact that providing value is a much sought-after thing in any economy and is something which central planning, be it peopled by devils or angels, can never achieve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the particular virtues of Moby Dick, extolled by schoolteachers far and wide to those of us old enough to have read Melville\u2019s magnum opus, was that the sailing... Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1030"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1046,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030\/revisions\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}