Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt was a Carnival Cruise ship officer before building his bookstore empire

James Daunt’s favorite book is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though the Barnes & Noble CEO has never finished it. He says he’s returned to the novel several times, but always stops short of its conclusion so he can preserve the feeling of coming back to it.

That may be an unusual habit for the executive leading America’s largest bookstore chain. But Daunt has never had a conventional career. Before he ran Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and his own Daunt Books chain, he worked as a purser for Carnival Cruise Lines and later as an investment banker at JPMorgan. 

Now, Daunt is applying his skills as an independent bookseller to execute a comeback for one of retail’s most recognizable big-box brands. Since becoming CEO of Barnes & Noble in 2019, Daunt has focused on shifting power away from headquarters and into the hands of frontline employees.

“I had been a bookseller for 30 years at this point,” Daunt told Fortune’s Phil Wahba for Behind the Business. “I simply wanted to make these stores really good again. One sets on a series of very slow and incremental processes to do that.”

Daunt’s route to bookselling was anything but direct. After studying history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he worked as a pursuer for Carnival Cruise Lines, a job that put him in charge of administrative, financial, and guest-relations duties on the ships.

In 1985, he moved to New York to become an investment banker at JPMorgan. While he enjoyed the business trips, Daunt quickly determined that banking was not his........

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