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Originally Posted by derangedhermit
10 year plans are useless.
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Agreed. It could be that eBook penetration is near its max, and it could be that in ten years paper books will be no more popular than 33 1/3 RPM records are today.
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Anyway, even in a down US economy 2008-2012, revenue increased 31%. That's enough growth (from a profitable 2008) that things should be in pretty good shape. Not great, but pretty good.
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Didn't the revenue increase because of a non-repeatable event, the death of Borders?
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So the first thing to be done is to get a new CEO, one that institutes internal cost discipline, and drives down COGS relative to revenue - doing whatever is needed to make that happen. If that can't be done, no plan will matter.
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The reason they are the sole surviving big national chain is because they did a good job of that. Statistics on companies changing CEO's are not encouraging, especially if they choose an outsider.
Since there is no way they can beat Amazon on price, maybe they are better off positioning themselves as a luxury provider. I'm not seriously arguing this, because there is no way to know how the market for books will move.
A successful CEO for B&N needs two things:
1. Basic managerial competence.
2. Luck.