As I reflect on a working career spanning nearly 40 years that has included jobs ranging in scope from building retaining walls, to co-owning a painting company, to delivering newspapers, to middle management, to coding, to designing web sites, to even a stint working the night stocking shift at Office Max (remember them?) during my tenure in Graduate School, never in all that time have I worked for an organization that has embraced sub-standard performance from its leadership as much as Staples.
From the CEO on down there exists a barren landscape void of imagination, vision, integrity, passion, and the ability to inspire not only internally but externally. Nevertheless, it is ripe with dated management philosophies requisite from the passé teachings of the MBA programs from which Staples draws its senior and junior level managers. Top down oppressive fist banging oligarchs of failure primed for a world of weeks, months, and years trying to compete in an era of milliseconds, seconds, minutes, and hours while espousing a cut throat culture of blame and self advancement.
Staples continues to blindly follow a belief system predicated on the notion that there is and was an “Office Supply Industry” rather than acknowledging the concept of the stationary store was simply “supersized” and re-titled. It took this belief to the “nth” degree when it attempted to execute a previously failed 18 year old strategy in purchasing Office Depot at a cost of $250 million in fees and probably the same again in internal buried “costs of doing business” associated to the planned acquisition. And yet, the Board rewards the architect of this disaster and the 10 year decline of the company with a dignified exit replete with a retirement package. Not a sound message to society.
Thus the Sargent was removed from the battlefield and instead of giving us the General we so desperately need, the Board gives a Private Second Class at best. “20/20”? You know what’s 20/20: Hindsight. Our forward looking strategy is to look backward. When a person essentially begs people to follow them as our current CEO did in the closing of the most recent state of the company address it doesn’t take an advanced degree to know that this is not the person to lead Staples into the future.
So is it all doom and gloom? Pull yourselves off the ledge and back into the safety of the building fellow Staplers. There is one glimmer of hope on the horizon and it rests with the Lead Director and Head of the CEO Search Committee. This President and CEO of CRBE knows how to lead, knows what a good management structure looks like, knows what success is, and most importantly understands the power of technology, the need to leverage it, and that a modern tech stack is crucial to moving forward. Odds are he’s looking for someone with the same qualities, who’s hungry and unproven but feels they have something to prove, who can communicate a vision, who sees the world in 10 year blocks but who can break it down into smaller actionable segments, and who knows how to build a culture and run a team.
Let us encourage our Board to do the job that they are elected to do and take a modern turn towards supporting a 21st Century workplace by hiring a leader who believes in a flat management structure, a meritocracy, true teamwork, a Championship Culture, and who isn’t afraid to remove those who do not support the standards we set ourselves not those set for us.
Should they not, then we just leave the current rudderless barge that is Staples to drift on the sea of the economy until it runs aground on the shoals of bankruptcy and slowly decays into the dust of memory that is the mindless banter of Fitzgeraldian Wall Street c---tail parties.