Leaders and Strategies in Real Life: 4/2/19

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Instead of studying leadership, why not spend some time studying leaders and strategies in the wild? You can learn a lot from leadership experts, but you always see the leader and what he or she does through the expert’s personal lens. Supplement that learning with studying real leaders in real life situations and draw your own conclusions. The posts in this series will help you.

Every week I’ll point you to articles by and about real leaders in real situations and to articles about how real companies are faring in the marketplace. Read them. Think about them. Draw your own lessons and conclusions from them. Then try to apply those lessons in your own real life.

This week I’m pointing you to articles about KIND Healthy Snacks, Saks, Target, Blockbuster (the last one), and Tim Sloan.

From Robert Reiss: KIND’s Leaders Share How Their Differences Fueled The Healthy Snack Company’s Success

“In a bright conference room in KIND’s Manhattan headquarters, Daniel invited his longtime partner – the company’s President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), John Leahy – to join us. On the eve of John’s retirement, the duo reflected on their nine years together and how their differences helped fuel KIND’s growth.”

Thanks to Smartbrief on Leadership for pointing me to this story

From Phil Wahba: Saks Takes Back Fifth Avenue

“Ascending a sleek new multi-colored escalator, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Saks Fifth Avenue president Marc Metrick is a man vibrating with excitement ahead of its grand unveiling. The escalator’s bright red and blue hues and a large LED ceiling (that creates the illusion of a blue sky) pop in sharp contrast with the grey curtains used to cordon off a dusty construction area. Change is afoot on the ground floor of one Manhattan’s most iconic department stores.”

From Jackie Crosby: Target CEO: $7 billion investment in stores and technology is paying off

“Two years in, Target’s huge gamble to invest $7B in stores and technology is paying off. The question now is, can the momentum continue?”

From Tiffany Hsu: The World’s Last Blockbuster Has No Plans to Close

“The second-to-last Blockbuster, a squat blue-and-yellow slab wedged next to a real estate agency in Western Australia, will stop renting videos on Thursday and shut down for good at the end of the month. Two stores in Alaska, part of the final group of Blockbuster outlets in the United States, closed in July. That will make the Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., one of a kind: a corporate remnant, just off the highway, near a cannabis retailer and a pet cremation service.”

From Dan Bigman: Tim Sloan And The Dirty Job of Cleaning Up

“Tim Sloan, CEO of Wells Fargo, retired today. Can you blame him? No one—at least no one in their right mind—would have traded places with Sloan. When he took over the bank in October 2016, the best anyone could really say about the job was that someone had to do it, and it paid well. His predecessor, John Stumpf, had overseen one of the worst corporate-culture disasters in a generation, one in which bank employees had defrauded customers, opening more than 2 million fake bank and credit card accounts.”

For some ideas about how to get more from this series of posts, check out “Studying Leaders in the Wild.

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