Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2003512 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-08
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
"Arthur Martinez provides us with a genuinely inspiring and challenging story of the great Sears turnaround of the 1990s. Learning this story will provide every manager and business leader with invaluable insights on how to build a stronger, more customer-centric business."
--Adrian J. Slywotzky, vice president of Mercer Management Consulting and author of The Profit Zone and How Digital Is Your Business?
"Be warned. This is a story as gripping as a good novel, complete with easily absorbed wisdom and a hero. It's also an authentic blueprint of how the best managers in the best businesses in our country get the job done."
--Charlotte L. Beers, former chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather
"Honest and insightful, Arthur Martinez's inside story of the Sears turnaround is an important read. He paints a picture of the challenges faced by the contemporary CEO: remaining true to a great brand's core values, dealing with culture shock in a proud organization, addressing the implications of a changing consumer and fast-moving competition."
--Paul R. Charron, chairman and CEO of Liz Claiborne, Inc.
"The Hard Road to the Softer Side describes well what can happen when one combines the leader's genuine concern for the customer with a dedicated team and great locations. Martinez transformed Sears from a laggard to a leader once again."
--Walter Y. Elisha, former CEO of Springs Industries
"Arthur Martinez's Sears saga makes a powerful point: meaningful and relevant brands and companies should never die. This is the most insightful, educative business case history I have ever read."
--Peter A. Georgescu, chairman emeritus of Young & Rubicam, Inc.
"As a retail leader, Arthur Martinez showed a passion for the business. He says he did not save Sears, that the company's employees did. But this book demonstrates the important contribution his passionate leadership made to the transformation. Others can learn much from his experience."
--Allen Questrom, chairman and CEO of JCPenney

Synopsis
The just-retired CEO of Sears offers a candid account of one of the biggest and most intriguing business stories of our time - the two transformations of his company and its struggle to emerge from its old-economy as a new-economy winner. When Arthur Martinez took charge at Sears in 1992, he found a once-great company facing a loss of $4 billion, with a Soviet-style bureaucracy, little idea of its target customer and an army of disheartened employees. Many experts thought Sears was too far gone to save. But save it Martinez did, putting Sears in the black by 1994 and sailing on through 1997. Then Sears hit the wall again with new aggressive competitors challenging traditional retailers, a huge ethics problem relating to the way it treated customers who declared bankruptcy, a war for talent as competitors lured away key staff and a slowdown in sales. Today Sears is once again a healthy company. The story of how Martinez and his team worked their way through not one but two crises is a compelling - and highly instructive - one for anyone who works, shops or lives in the new economy.