The radical idea behind Barnes & Noble’s surprising comeback

In today’s CEO Daily: B&N CEO James Daunt abandoned an old business model to revive the bookstore chain.

The big leadership story: Fidji Simo on why she left OpenAI

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Good morning. Phil Wahba writing from New York this morning. Remember when Barnes & Noble seemed to be circling the drain a few years ago? Now, the big-box bookstore is on track to open 60 stores this year and have more total locations than in 2019, the year CEO James Daunt took the reins to execute a retail comeback for the ages.

The return to form is all the more stunning given that book sales overall are barely rising, and Amazon, which nearly felled Barnes & Noble in the 2010s, is still a threat. But the more useful story for any leader isn’t that a bookstore survived—it’s how. Daunt bet the comeback on a single idea most large organizations resist: stripping power away from headquarters and handing it to the frontline employees. For CEOs weighing how much control to centralize, Barnes & Noble is a live case study in what happens when you trust the people closest to the customer to make the call.

For Daunt, a Brit who also runs an eponymous indie bookstore chain in the U.K., the plan was relatively simple: He began to make Barnes & Noble stores look, feel, and function like neighborhood bookstores........

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