You’re a fucking asshole. How dare you question what the failures working at these stores demand of you!
Asshole!:mad:
Not that I can post in this forum.
Then it should be easy for you to quote where you encountered it on this board.
OP, do you think societies should be structured like the most profitable corporations? Are you, in fact, George W. Bush?
This is for me a record to read 60 plus posts on any subject: Sears Roebuck’s
decline under a Mr. Lambert. Lambert admitted at the beginning that this was going
to be a test case, an experiment in management. His story became a Libertarian
football in SDMB! A great read thanks to some smart people.
First, Western Auto went down. Then Montgomery Ward sank (they had such great prices!)
Then J.C. Penney eliminated tools and electronics and started emulating Lord & Taylor.
And then K-Mart fired the manager who invented the blue light special. And now icon Sears
playing out the fate of Ozymandias. I guess we have to say goodbye to 20th C retailing.
Absolutely wrong. In libertarianism, ANY coercion is literally illegal. That’s, in a nutshell, the definition of libertarianism.
No more of this, please. You’re allowed to comment on a poster’s arguments and views, but there are rules against personal insults in this forum and this is primary a personal attack (particularly the bit about intellectual dishonesty). If you have a problem with another poster, start a BBQ Pit thread.
Libertarianism isn’t an economic system, it’s a political philosophy. To gauge the success of libertarianism, you can’t look at a profit-and-loss sheet, any more than you can evaluate a nation’s political system just by looking at their GDP. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds individual freedom to be the highest ideal. That’s it.
Can you explain how independent divisions within a simple company, that answer to Lambert and the other corporate executives are in any way a model of a free market? For that to be so, the separate divisions would have to be truly separate…i.e., distinct firms, like Wal-Mart, Target, and Meijer. Target and Wal-Mart do not get policy dictates from a shared CEO, they are actually independent. The Sears divisions were quasi-independent, which can work in a business model where cooperation is less necessary than it is in retail.
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Second, I think some libertarian defenders want to characterize Mr. Lambert’s decisions about how to run the company as a form of coercion–that the various divisions of Sears wouldn’t have engaged in a counterproductive competition if Lambert hadn’t gamed the system. From the article, lets look at the specifics of his business model:
I don’t see any way to read this other than Lambert trying to model within his company the natural laws of the free market (the comparison to Greenwich Avenue–a real-world shopping district–is the clincher).
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Greenwich Avenue is a shopping district: independent stores in a common area, much like Melbourne’s example of Westfields. Both of those operations are successful. Why don’t they prove that independent divisions work, if Sears can prove that it doesn’t?
While mergers and joint ventures and such do occur, generally strict competitors remain strict competitors. Target, Meijer, Wal-Mart, and K-Mart don’t cooperate either, except in areas of mutual interest (such as political lobbying).
Why don’t they cooperate? Because each acts in their own best interest. They cooperate when it benefits them to do so, and do not when it doesn’t. Sears’ divisions were no different.
It produced exactly the result I’d have predicted. Also, “market forces” isn’t a strategy or a model you can introduce in your company. Each person and firm is subject to market forces, it’s not something you can choose to implement or not.
Again, you are conflating market economics and libertarianism. How and why economic actors cooperate, compete, or make any decision has been studied for centuries. The answer libertarianism generally assumes is a popular one: people act in their own rational best interest, limited by their ability to grasp what’s in their best interest.
I reject anarchism too. Of the non-anarchist libertarians I’ve read or spoken with, probably 99% support a central government in the form of democracy. I’m not sure you understand what libertarianism is.
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Third, some have said it’s inappropriate to test libertarian philosophy in this way, because the rules can’t really be applied in this case. This seems to be the heart of Labrador Receiver’s sarcastic quips “I debunked libertarianism by using it as a model for child-rearing,” and “We threw out all the rules associated with football, and used a libertarian model instead - a philosophic criticism.” That’s fine, but IMO you need to explain why Sears was an inappropriate test, especially given (1) this was Lambert’s stated intention, and (2) it isn’t obvious that the operations of Sears were unlike a competition (for company resources) between autonomous economic actors (the various divisions) in a free market (the various board meetings)–something that can fairly be extrapolated to a real-world economy.
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The divisions were not autonomous actors, for one, they were parts of a whole. And that whole was exposed to competition from outside the system.
Again, look at firms that are actually independent; say, Wal-Mart and Target again. They are competing for resources, the shopping dollars of their customers, by selling similar products in a similar way. Do you view their choosing to remain competitors as a failure, an indictment of the free market? If not, I can’t understand why you’d think parts of a company competing when they are set up to do so as some sort of a failure. The failure was thinking that competition would benefit a company in the retail business, which requires interdependence and cooperation.
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And if we concede that libertarianism doesn’t always work as an organizing principle, what can we learn from these exceptions? Why, for example, can’t a libertarian model work in football when it comes to, say, competition for player services?
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Assuming again that you mean a free-market model, as a “libertarian model” for anything but a system of government is meaningless, a free-market model does work for putting together a football team. It’s called free agency: you can sign any player you can come to terms with.
[QUOTE=CJJ*]
Can that same logic be applied in other examples? Perhaps libertarians can learn something from Lambert’s failed experiment, rather than dismiss it as worthless and doubting (like jayarod7) whether Mr Lambert is “honestly a libertarian”. I certainly don’t claim to know his heart, but his goals seemed pretty clear.
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No offense, but I’d say you have a lot more to learn about what libertarianism is than we have to learn from a foolish management strategy.
This. As others have said, the OP clearly misunderstands libertarianism.
As to whether decentralized organizations can be more successful: In software development the trend now is to be an “Agile” or “Lean” organization. These concepts, and associated methodologies such as “Scrum” are based on self organizing teams that don’t have direct control by management. The “managers” are called Scrum Masters and are servant leaders who basically just enforce the rules of Scrum but let the team manage itself.
It works well. But it’s got nothing to do with libertarianism.
This.
Also this.
I recommend you try your best to ignore him. That’s what the rest of us basically do. I think he’s got compromising pictures of C K Dexter Haven or something. For some reason he has a free pass to threadshit all over this board and basically isn’t moderated.
Not really. We’re talking about retail here, and Krugman is careful to say “certain services”. So, unless he’s including retail in those services (and I can tell you right now he isn’t), then the analogy fails.
Libertarians are not anarchists, and so Libertarians* do recognize that “certain services” are best provided by a government. We’re just arguing about which services fall in that category.
*As did Ayn Rand, who never considered herself a Libertarian, but that’s a whole 'nuther story.
I am about as dubious about large-scale implementation of libertarian principles as a general believer in capitalism gets, but I really don’t see how this article has all that much to do with libertarianism. First, decentralization of business operations is not a libertarian principle.
I’d go a step further and say that decentralization itself is not a libertarian principle, but instead a principle often adhered to by libertarians. Nothing about the political philosophy itself demands that government be decentralized, only that it uphold ideals of individual liberty and political freedom, and prevent coercion by others. Decentralization is thought by many to be a practical way to limit the power of government to the role that is deemed proper for it, but it’s not an ideal of the philosophy in itself. A highly centralized government can still be a libertarian one.
Pretty much everything you said in your post about DT is correct, but you’d be better off saying it in the pit. I haven’t seen him ever produce a single cite or respond substantially in all the time I’ve been lurking/posting here. He’s entertaining to read in his anti-religion rants(but even that enjoyment is somewhat tempered by his rather visceral need to abuse Christianity in particular rather than religion in general - when all of them deserve opprobrium). You’d be best off reading his posts in Cafe Society/Game room, where he’s a fun poster, and passing over his screeds elsewhere.
You’re conflating two things right here that bother me. For one, you can believe in the “invisible hand of the market” and the rationality (over the long term) of markets as an end result of millions of decisions over time by free people without believing at all in libertarianism. I’m a conservative, not a libertarian. But I believe firmly in the capitalist economic system and free markets, and in the “invisible hand of the market.”
The point that either the article or you are trying to make gets muddy for me because you equate the libertarian political system with the capitalist economic system. Libertarians favor minimal government interference in the lives of its citizens, and that means they typically support laissez-faire capitalism because that is basically the best known form of modern “organically grown” economic systems. Basically that is the default in most advanced societies unless the government regulates it in some way.
But you can believe a minimalist government philosophy like libertarianism is hopelessly utopian (my belief) without believing the free markets are a bad thing.
I’m not actually sure either the article or Lambert has accurately described the Sears business model. From what I’ve seen based on the evidence Eddie Lambert buys businesses and chops them up and sells off the parts where he can make money. I think his primary reason for buying Sears was to at some point sell it off and make money from it. He’s not a buy and hold investor like Buffet. I think the reason he has split his company up so much is it makes it easier to sell parts of it, and it makes it easier for him to decide which parts he can get rid of to make the core company more valuable when he sells it. I think he was doing a decent job of getting to a point where he could have sold KMart for a big profit. I think when he bought Sears he got a bad deal and he’s floundering around trying to find some way to get what he wanted out of his investment long term.
I think there is a good chance if you understand how private equity firms operate you’d understand why Lambert has done what he’s done, but I think he has reasons for not being honest about that.
Prior to naming himself CEO of Sears his management experience was minimal, he ran an investment shop where he bought companies and later sold them. Before he got into Sears people called Lambert the “next Warren Buffet” except that Warren Buffet never buys companies with terrible management unless he’s damn sure he can replace them with a good management team to unlock strong intrinsic value. Buffet also doesn’t micromanage the businesses he holds, if he had to do that, he would never buy the business in the first place. Buffet is honest about the fact he simply is not capable of managing all the different businesses he owns, but he’s smart about deciding which ones are good to own as an investor-owner instead of an owner-manager.
Basically, Lambert is trying to suck return on his investment out of Sears anyway he can. When he went from what he was previously good at (buying badly run companies and selling them a bit later for big returns) into the world of trying to turn around a huge failing retailer all on his own, he made a bad mistake from which he will probably not realize return on invested capital.
It’s an inappropriate test for the same reason that judging socialism/communism by the relative performance of co-ops versus for profit businesses isn’t an appropriate test. Socialism/Communism are societal governance systems that also impact how the economies of those countries will operate, but they were never presented as valid ways to run a successful business. There are many co-op businesses, but they have limited growth capacity and tend toward smaller enterprises, they do not compete well with larger businesses. That doesn’t mean Socialism/Communism are invalid or bad societal governance systems (I think they are, but for a more robust list of reasons.)
During the American Revolution, the militia elected their own officers, and could also basically remove their own officers. This is part of the reason the militia were so ineffective. The best way to run a military is with basically a chain of dictators. Your CO is god, his CO is his god, his CO is his god, and ultimately the general is everybody’s god. If you have a problem with that you face extreme and swift punishment. This is because armies only win when they are cohesive forces, armies ran by committee fail and people die. That doesn’t mean we want to run our country that way. Further, the fact that democratic or even libertarian principles in the military would result in catastrophe says nothing about whether or not we should use those principles in running our country.
Businesses, from the best evidence we have, are also best ran as a form of dictatorship. Apple under Steve Jobs, Ford under Henry Ford, for most businesses the man at the top must basically be a tyrant. He can be an enlightened tyrant, he can be a delegating tyrant, but a tyrant he must be.
If you’re running a country as a dictator it can sometimes make sense to play your underlings off against one another. Hitler actually did this, it wasn’t in the best interests of Germany but it kept other bases of power from developing, so it was in the best interests of Hitler.
In a company, it’s almost never worked to foster competition among your departments. It sometimes works to be very “un-integrated”, but mostly only in conglomerates where the different pieces have nothing to do with one another and where they operate best basically as their own independent companies. But conglomerates like GE and Berkshire-Hathaway almost never try to set up their constituent pieces to compete against one another. That is counter productive, instead while some pieces are very standalone, they try to coordinate the units that have natural synergies.
Your ultimate point seems to be that fostering competition caused Sears to fail, and so it also will fail in society. History suggests otherwise. Since the 19th century competition between businesses in free market economies have lead to the greatest, most sustained increase in wealth known to history. So the fact that competition failed inside of Sears says nothing about competition in society as a whole. And, of course, it has nothing to do with libertarianism. Libertarianism is a bad political system because it is utopian, but you’re equating libertarianism with being a bad political system to also say the free market is a bad economic system, which is patently unproven based on anything to do with libertarianism.
I’d say that’s a distinction without difference. Views on abortion are closely correlated (probably) with views on gun control, but the two clearly have very little to do with each other. Views on how government should operate are pretty much inseparable, though.
Except even most hardcore libertarians do not advocate decentralization in businesses or the military for example. In fact they mostly only advocate decentralization in government. The Koch brothers do not run their company as libertarians, but they founded the Cato Institute and if they aren’t libertarians I don’t really know who would qualify.
Surely there’s a difference between “government should be local and decentralized because that is better” and “government power should be limited, and one sensible way to do that is to keep jurisdictions small and portfolios limited”.
Not a huge difference, of course. To take up your analogy, it’s like the difference between supporting abortion because women should have a right to control their reproduction, and because unwanted children will disproportionately become criminals. The net effect is the same (support for abortion rights), but the thought process behind it is not.
How would it be illegal? Would there be a law? Wouldn’t you then have a government coercing private citizens not to be coercive? And wouldn’t that coercion completely contradict what libertarianism is supposed to be about?