Amazon Was Supposed to Kill the Bookstore. James Daunt Had Other Plans | Better in Person

James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, walked into the corporate headquarters of a failing 300-store chain with a radical idea: stop telling the stores what to do. As a small independent bookseller who had never run a large business, he knew that the central office was spending millions dictating uniform merchandising to every location. His solution was to fire most of the home office and let each store run itself. This conversation with Steven Dubner explores the psychology and practical principles behind that counterintuitive approach.

The Principle of Long-Term Quality Over Short-Term Gain

Daunt’s core philosophy is simple and old-fashioned: “quality will out,” and you should never sacrifice the medium and long term for the short term. He attributes the near-collapse of Waterstones before his arrival to leaders who were “always pursuing the short term and getting fixated on the short term and then being locked into another spiral of downward short term decisions.” This fixation, he argues, came from both ownership pressures and a “pursuit of glory.” The result was a boring, uniform chain that was expensive to run and dispiriting for its employees. His approach was the opposite: he knew his own small bookstore had taken five years to become successful, and he was willing to apply that same patience to a much larger scale.