"Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match. This, he believed, would cause them to act rationally and boost performance."
I would be tempted to blame Ayn Rand as well, but in the end the responsibility is of those who apply what she invented, especially when they should know better.
> pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match
From what I've heard, Google had similar battles between senior leaders and they've been wildly successful. While these policies probably didn't help the situation at Sears, I'd be very hesitant to say they were the cause of the decline.
I think Salon was looking at the situation without enough objectivity in an attempt to discredit a philosophy they find distasteful. And I think people like you who are laying the blame on the implementation may also be attributing too much of the outcome to how the company was run. Sometimes a company is just destined to fail by circumstance. It's very hard for an established company to constantly maintain the fresh perspective necessary to get out in front of the game-changing trends and not be reactive. If it weren't, startups disrupting existing businesses would not be so successful. That Sears stayed at the top for 100 years seems more of an anomaly rather than their failure in the past 30 or so.
Sears isn't the only company of its sort to have problems...just look at JC Penny. I'd be more willing to chalk Sears failure up to Walmart, Target, Amazon, Best Buy and the rest of the newer companies that ate their market by using newer technologies, better managing the supply chain and otherwise adapting to the changing world. Sears got big by changing the game and dominating mail order and it adapted well to the retail department store/mall eras. But they weren't able to transition to the internet, aren't able to compete on price with the lower-margin retailers and aren't considered premium enough to go up-market. There's very little they can offer right now that others can't do better and that would likely be the case no matter which principles they'd used to run their business.
Google's advertising revenue-via-search-monopoly gives them a lot of cushion. No matter how poorly (or well) managed they are, problems won't be visible unless the search advertising market starts to dry up, because no one will question their performance. It would be interesting to observe an alternate universe where Google that had to derive revenue solely from hardware sales.
Yes, applying any single philosophy as a replacement for sound perspective on your business fundamentals seems like a bad idea. However, you don't typically see executives preaching communism as a solution. There is something particularly seductive about Randism to a certain class of corporative executive.
> From what I've heard, Google had similar battles between senior leaders and they've been wildly successful.
Those battles are for who can make the best product, a winner is crowned and done. It's not the same as making departments constantly battle each other with no end.
i.e. battle for two similar competing products, not unrelated things.
"Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match. This, he believed, would cause them to act rationally and boost performance."
I would be tempted to blame Ayn Rand as well, but in the end the responsibility is of those who apply what she invented, especially when they should know better.