I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge.

This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... <br /> —Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope@indieweb.social) https://indieweb.social/@Chronotope/109597430733908319 Dec 29, 2022, 06:27 · Mastodon for Android

Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.

How is one to balance these sorts of decisions at the center of a company? What role do examples of tastemakers and creatives have in spaces like fashion for this? How about the control exerted by Steve Jobs at Apple in shaping the purchasing decisions of the users vis-a-vis auteur theory? (Or more broadly, how does one retain the idea of a central vision or voice with the creative or business inputs of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others?)

How can you balance the regression to the mean with potentially cutting edge internal ideas which may give the company a more competitive edge versus the mean?

1. Marshall, C.C. Collection-level analysis tools for books online. Proc. of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories. (Napa Valley, CA, Oct. 26–30) ACM, New York, 2008.

Cathy Marshall has found that students evaluated their textbooks prior to purchasing based on the annotations within them.

This seems shocking to me.