The New York Times ran a fascinating article on Sunday about Apple’s store employees. I pasted the link below. The article focused on a rather interesting situation: Apple manages to hire highly skilled and motivated people despite paying them about $11 per hour and providing no real career path. These people could likely make far […]
You can learn a couple important things from J.C. Penney’s Michael Francis. Francis, of course, was President of J.C. Penney until he abruptly departed earlier this week. He was at the company for about eight months. Learning number 1: It is all about the results. J.C. Penney is in the middle of a major […]
Tomorrow more than 500 students will graduate from Kellogg. Many of them are my students; I’ve had the joy of teaching almost half of the group in my marketing strategy and biomedical marketing courses. I’ll be at the ceremony but I won’t be addressing the students tomorrow; I was a finalist for professor the year […]
J.C. Penney is in the midst of a major transformation. As I noted a couple weeks back, the company is moving away from its reliance on discounts; J.C. Penney has lowered everyday retail prices and is doing less price cutting. This year the company stopped using the word sale entirely, instead focusing on what it called “month-long […]
Sara Lee announced today that it is changing its name to Hillshire Brands after it spins off its coffee division. This is a smart move but I wonder if the executives at Hillshire missed an opportunity. There was little chance the company would keep the Sara Lee brand. Sara Lee is closely associated with frozen desserts, […]