Filed under: Management, Sears Holdings (SHLD)
As my colleague Douglas McIntyre pointed out this morning as well, Sears Holdings (NYSE: SHLD) chairman Ed Lampert wants to shake things up at the struggling retailer.
According (subscription required) to the Wall Street Journal, Lampert “plans to reorganize the 121-year-old retailer into several businesses with broad authority to shape their own future.”
Lampert will essentially adopt a holding company structure for the company: real estate, brands, operating businesses, online, support, and other.
When naming Lampert the worst CEO of 2007 (although, as Greenberg notes, the sorry distinction of being Sears’ official CEO goes to Aylwin Lewis), Herb Greenberg blamed a big part of Sears’ problems on capital allocation: “Lampert’s mantra has been profits over sales, which makes sense if it works … So far, for all of Sears, including Kmart, the strategy has failed miserably.”
Shifting the corporate structure is probably just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic — the real problem for Sears as a retailer is its failure to invest and keep up with faster moving competition.
See also Gary Sattler’s Get off Eddie Lampert’s back already, will ya?
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