And every decision made is deeply, deeply flawed.
Take, for example, the corporate bloat.
The HR model at Target includes a very specific component around the number of direct reports. In order to get promoted, one needs XXXX number of direct reports. But if you only have X direct reports, and want to get promoted, you find a way to build out your team, fiefdom-style, by politicking for, and creating, new job numbers with the support of the company's leadership model driven entirely by cronyism and popularity.
So now you have all of these teams - literally thousands of them - adding roles left and right. The best way to solve a problem isn't to actually fix it quickly...it's to hire seven people to support it.
And those seven people become part of the fiefdom that helps position a manager for a group manager, or a group manager for a senior group manager, or a senior group manager for a director.
Eventually, the bloat becomes so bad that you can no longer fit your employees in their building. So, you spend tens - maybe hundreds!- of millions of dollars building out an entirely new facility (in Brooklyn Park?) to house them.
But you overbuild, and at the time of the company's peak in size, you still have almost half of all four buildings sitting EMPTY.
Then Cornell starts to reverse the bloat, and eliminate all these roles, and now you've got huge vast expanses of real estate that all are all over the Twin Cities sitting partially occupied. City Center, Retek, Target Plaza, North Campus, the investment in wasted real estate over the past two years alone is absolutely SHOCKING
Nothing at Target makes sense. Literally every major decision lasts about two years before someone realizes it's completely broken and needs to be COMPLETELY reversed. See Canada, Target.com, Bob Derodes announcing after six weeks that the move to TNC was the worst decision ever, etc.
The waste is horrific. The decisions are mind-blowing. And NO ONE ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE.
Also, can we please get some goddamn buttons INSIDE the elevators at TNC, like every other office building in the history of the planet?